Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/601

 passion with him from childhood, and as a lad he developed poetical ambitions. He devoted his leisure in London to a study of Cobbett's ‘French without a Master,’ and of books by Tom Paine, Volney, and Howitt. As early as 1848 he published with a bookseller at Tring a first volume, ‘Poems and Chansons,’ and sold some 250 copies at a shilling each to his fellow-townsfolk. The revolutionary spirit of the times caught his enthusiasm, and joining the Chartists he applied his pen to the support of their cause. With one John Bedford Leno, a Chartist printer of Uxbridge, he edited in 1849, at twenty-one, a paper written by working-men called ‘The Spirit of Freedom.’ Next year he contributed some forcible verse to ‘Cooper's Journal,’ a venture of the Chartist, Thomas Cooper [q. v.] (cf. Life, 4th edit. 1873, p. 320). But Massey's sympathies veered to the religious side of the reforming movement, and in the same year he associated himself with the Christian Socialists under the leadership of Frederick Denison Maurice, who wrote of him at the time to Charles Kingsley as ‘not quite an Alton Locke,’ but with ‘some real stuff in him’ (, Life of F. D. Maurice, ii. 36). Massey acted as secretary of the Christian Socialist Board and contributed verse to its periodical ‘The Christian Socialist.’ During the same year (1850) he brought out a second volume of verse, ‘Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love,’ which showed genuine poetic feeling, although the style was rough and undisciplined. Next year he welcomed Kossuth to England in a poem, and he enthusiastically championed the cause of Italian unity.

Massey fully established his position as a poet of liberty, labour, and the people with a third volume, ‘The Ballad of Babe Christabel and other Poems,’ which appeared in Feb. 1854. The book, which dealt with conjugal and parental affection as well as with democratic aspirations, passed through five editions within a year, and was reprinted in New York, where Massey's position was soon better assured than in London. Despite obvious signs of defective education and taste, Massey's poetry deserved its welcome. Hepworth Dixon in the ‘Athenæum’ (4 Feb. 1854) called him ‘a genuine songster.’ The best-known poets of the day acknowledged his ‘lyrical impulse and rich imagination.’ Alexander Smith likened him to Burns, while Walter Savage Landor in the ‘Morning Advertiser’ compared him with Keats, Hafiz, and Shakespeare as a sonneteer. Tennyson was hardly less impressed, although he thought that the new poet made ‘our good old English crack and sweat for it occasionally’ ( Life, i. 405). Ruskin regarded Massey's work ‘as a helpful and precious gift to the working classes.’ Sydney Dobell, a warm admirer, became a close personal friend, and Massey named his first-born son after him.

To ‘Babe Christabel’ there succeeded five further volumes of verse, viz. ‘War Waits’ (1855, two editions), poems on the Crimean War; ‘Craigcrook Castle’ (1856); ‘Robert Burns, a Song, and other Lyrics’ (1859); ‘Havelock's March,’ poems on the Indian Mutiny (1860); and ‘A Tale of Eternity and other Poems’ (1869). The poem on Burns was sent in for the Crystal Palace competition at the Burns centenary in 1859, and although it failed to win the prize, was placed in the first six of the competing works. [See .] Other of the volumes include ballads breathing an admirable martial and patriotic ardour. Massey's ballad ‘Sir Richard Grenville's Last Fight’ is for its fine spirit worthy of a place beside Tennyson's ‘Revenge,’ which was written much later, and his tribute to England's command of the sea in ‘Sea Kings’ clearly adumbrates Rudyard Kipling's ‘Song of the Dead’ in ‘The Seven Seas’ (1896). Massey's narrative verse embodies mystical speculation and was less successful; his range and copiousness suffered from laxity of technique; but both in England and America he long enjoyed general esteem. In 1857 Ticknor & Field of Boston published his ‘Complete Poetical Works,’ with a biographical sketch, and in 1861 a similar collection came out in London with illustrations and a memoir by Samuel Smiles. In his lectures on ‘Self-help’ in 1859 Smiles set Massey high among his working-class heroes. After 1860 Massey gradually abandoned poetry for other interests which he came to deem more important, and his vogue as a poet decayed. In 1899 Massey's eldest daughter, Christabel, collected for her father his chief poems in two volumes under the title of ‘My Lyrical Life.’ This anthology goes far to justify the admiration of an earlier generation.

Meanwhile Massey sought a livelihood from journalism. For a time he worked with John Chapman [q. v. Suppl. I], the radical publisher in the Strand. ‘George Eliot’ who was also in Chapman's employ (1851–3) afterwards based on Massey's career some features of her ‘Felix Holt—