Hans Breitmann

THE lines are by Dr. Holmes, and the occasion—which would not have been an occasion without lines from him — was a dinner in 1881, when Charles Godfrey Leland, home from a ten years’ visit to England, his Hans Breitmann still in the floodtide of popularity, had been invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard.

This was almost twenty-five years ago, and I have heard it said that the “younger generation” no longer reads the Breitmann Ballads. But then I have also heard that the “younger generation” has grown too superior to read Dickens, and so, apparently, publishers persist in producing rival editions of the Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield just because it has become a habit in the trade, or because it amuses them to invest their money without. hope of return, which is scarcely the businesslike method publishers are usually given credit for. Editions, in the case of Breitmann, were, if not so many, at least many enough to show that, for half a century, everybody did read the Ballads, and I venture to predict that everybody will go on reading them after the young and their fashions have passed. For Breitmann has in him the stuff that endures,—the stuff that ensured his success at the start, though to us, in looking back, the moment of his appearance seems the one of all others when no American could have had time or inclination to try the “Breitmann cure.” For the first Ballad was written in 1856, the first collection was published in 1869, and the earliest and gayest verses, therefore, cover the period when the national selfconsciousness, always alert, had reached its most acute stage, when the country was engrossed in its own affairs as it had never been before, as, pray Heaven! it may never be again. Hans Breitmann reflected nothing American, he satirized nothing American. Any creature more unlike that long, thin, lank, nervous, almost ascetic Uncle Sam America has evolved as its national type, could not well be imagined than the big, fat, easygoing, beer-drinking, pleasure-loving German who was the hero of the Ballads. He was not of the soil, as were Parson Wilbur and Hosea Biglow, and the others who roused the laughter of overwrought patriotism. He was not even Pennsylvania Dutch, as critics who had never set foot in Pennsylvania were so ready to assert. He was in every sense an alien; by birth, in his language, — which was not Pennsylvania Dutch either, whatever the critics might fancy, — an alien in his thoughts, his habits, his ideals, if he can be said to have ideals. No figure could have been more unlooked-for in American literature, up till then so intensely national in character, — or “provincial,” I can fancy Mr. Henry James correcting me. Only now and then had a rare poet, like Poe, evaded this national responsibility and concerned himself with beauty alone, — very much as a rare artist, like Whistler, was beginning to prove in Paris that art knows no nationality, just when the Breitmann Ballads were being written in Philadelphia. But Poe was the exception. The typical American of letters — if genius can be typical — was Hawthorne, in whose prose, as in Lowell’s verse, the American, the New England inspiration cannot be forgotten for a minute.

Were it known of the author of the Ballads only that he was a Philadelphian, who, during those eventful years, worked as hard for his country as a man whose business it was to write could, the fact of his having created Breitmann then, or indeed at any other period, might seem as extraordinary. But a great deal more is known, and in this knowledge lies the explanation. To be told what a man laughs at is to be told what that man is, according to an old saying, more hackneyed than it deserves to be. For it is quite as true that, to be told what a man is, is to be told what he will laugh at. Charles Godfrey Leland being what he was, Hans Breitmann follows as a matter of course. Really, if for no better reason, I might recommend the study of Breitmann to the younger generation as a human document of uncommon interest.

For these are the circumstances. Charles Godfrey Leland — my Uncle, perhaps I should explain — was born in Philadelphia in 1824. This means that his most impressionable years belong to the period when children, happily for themselves, had not been supplied to any great extent with a literature of their own, and, if they happened to care for reading, had to read what their elders read, or what chance threw in their way. Philadelphia, just then, was passing through an interval of comparative indifference to the intellectual responsibilities of her great past, and chance, having the entire charge of the reading of this one child in particular, managed to direct it into the most unchildlike channels. He was deep in Jacob Böhme and Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, and translating François Villon, at an age when the American boy to-day is still enthralled by St. Nicholas, and in verse has not got much beyond Mother Goose. His schools were what schools mostly were then, the one master whose influence counted being Alcott, the last to show him the way out of the maze of mysticism and romance in which he was fast losing himself. His college was Princeton : in the early forties, “simply a mathematical school run on old-school Presbyterian principles,” as he describes it; and there he lived more than ever in the past with philosophers and poets, less and less in the present with the problems of actual life. I need hardly add that, his parents being New Englanders, the Quaker City his home, Presbyterian Princeton his college, he was brought up, morally and socially, as well as intellectually, with Puritanical strictness. Many a schoolboy of fourteen was more versed in the ways of the world than he when he left Princeton, he writes in his Memoirs. And it was at this point, of a sudden, that he hurried off to complete his training, not, as would have seemed consistent, behind the plough and in the potato patches of Brook Farm, not in the frigid atmosphere of Concord, but in the warmth and light, over the beer and through the smoke, of Heidelberg and Munich. That was why he used often to say he had been “ Germanized.” It was in Germany, where people are at once more absorbed in philosophy and more submerged in material living than anywhere else, that he first studied in a sympathetic atmosphere, that he first gained his experience of life. And in Germany, and afterwards from Germany, he traveled where and as students on the Continent mostly traveled in the forties, winding up in Paris, settling there in the Latin Quarter, attending lectures at the Sorbonne and the Collège Louis le Grand, fighting at the barricades of ’48.

And, after this, he came back to Philadelphia, of all places, to find a profession. Had he lived in New York or Boston and studied at Harvard, he probably would have been turned out a professor on the regulation lines. That Philadelphia and Princeton between them, with the more vividly colored student life of Heidelberg and Paris as antidote, were going to make him, instead, one of the most picturesque figures in American literature, he had no reason to know at that early date, and it would not have been much consolation to him if he had. To become a picturesque figure in the future could not help to pay his way at the present. First he tried the law, to satisfy his father. That the law would not answer, surely, must have been a foregone conclusion to himself. To cast a spell or work a charm for his clients would have been more in his line than to draw up a brief for them. But he had to do something, and he plunged into journalism, in those days no pleasant sinecure for anybody, no easy way of making the steady income odd literary commissions were to supplement, — odd literary commissions by themselves having a tendency to lead to nothing more brilliant than Poe’s tragic little cottage on the Hudson, for instance. From early in the fifties to late in the sixties, there was no busier journalist in America. He worked on papers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, at different times editing, or helping to edit, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Press, Knickerbocker’s and Graham’s: the two magazines that might serve now as records of all that was best in the American and much in the English literature of the day, Graham’s boasting the further distinction of having once had Poe for its editor. He threw himself heart and soul into the cause of abolition; he did what he could to uphold the central government, — Centralization versus State Rights was the title of one of his pamphlets read far and wide at the outbreak of the Civil War. He fought the battles of the North valiantly in the press, until he too shouldered a musket and marched to the front. As long as his country needed him, he was entirely at his country’s service. And yet, all the time, his real life — the life he loved, the life he would have chosen if free to choose — was in the world of thought, far removed from the practical affairs of America, where he had wandered with mystics and strange people through his years in school and college. It was his ambition to climb the heights of mysticism and romance,—when freedom came with his later years, did he not start straight away adventuring with Gypsies and Witches, studying Sorcery, wrestling with problems of Will and Sex ? But, for the time, Fate had drawn him deep down into the whirlpool of fact. To make up for it, however, Fate had endowed him with a sense of humor, and he was the first to laugh at the absurd contrast between the philosopher that would be, and the man of practical affairs that was. When he shaped this laughter into words, the result was, naturally, Breitmann; that is, the German, with his head in the heavens of philosophy and his feet in the ditch of necessity, spouting pure reason over his beer-mug, dropping the tears of sentiment on his sausage and sauerkraut.

Breitmann “flashed into being,” as Henley says of Panurge. How spontaneous was the laugh from which he sprang, the history of the early Ballads and the character of Breitmann himself go far to prove. This history I am able to give with details never before published. It was partly told in the author’s prefaces to the editions of 1871 and 1889. But it is more fully supplemented by the author’s marginal notes in his copies of these two editions, now in my possession. I read chance throughout, — the chance there is in any laugh that rings true. To begin with, it was the language that made Breitmann, and not Breitmann who made the language. For Breitmann did not appear until one, at least, of the ballads that now go by his name had got to the point of being printed. “ Der Freischütz was written before Hans Breitmann’s Barty,” is the note on a slip of paper inserted in the copy of the 1871 edition, open before me, “one season when a German troupe was playing at the Opera House in Philadelphia. It was first published in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, of which paper I was one of the editors. I subsequently republished it in Graham’s Magazine, with a small wood-cut, not larger than an English shilling, before each verse. These cuts were very clever and were executed by an engraver named Scattergood. Der Freischutz was one of several burlesque opera librettos which I wrote. They all had a great run through the newspapers. Der Freischütz was especially popular, but when published in a work with the rest of the Breitmann Ballads, the reviews declared it to be much inferior to any of the others.”

No matter what the reviews then said, of all these burlesques, Der Freischütz alone has lived. Only one besides, La Somnambula, have I found, even among my Uncle’s papers. It is in pamphlet form, the verses witty, a characteristic drawing by him decorating the title. But of the remaining numbers in the series, I doubt if a trace could be discovered by the most ardent collector. Der Freischütz in everyday English would probably have gone with the rest. For the sake of the parody, however, it had been put into the English of the German still struggling with an unfamiliar grammar and construction. To the hard-worked journalist, who had scribbled it off in his scant leisure moments, the subject and the language must have brought some charm of old associations, some memories of Heidelberg and Munich days. For once tried, it pleased him so well that he tried it again before that same year had come to an end. —

I do not believe any lines by an American — not the sayings of “John P. Robinson he,” nor the “Excelsior” of Longfellow’s insufferable youth, nor the catchwords of the Heathen Chinee and Little Breeches —were ever so bandied about from mouth to mouth, so quoted, so used, so abused. In all likelihood, the “younger generation ” that never heard of Breitmann has been loudest in asking, “Vhere ish dot barty now ? ” But no lines were ever less premeditated, ever more wholly the result of chance. “While editing Graham’s Magazine I had one day a space to fill,” their author says in his Memoirs, as he had already written in his copy of the 1871 edition. “In a hurry I knocked off Hans Breitmann s Barty (1856); I gave it no thought whatever.” “It was written only to fill up a page,” the note in the 1889 edition says, “and I never expected that any one would notice it.”

He thought so little of it, that in the Ballads immediately following the Barty, Breitmann was left out as often as not. The real link at first was the language, though nothing was further from his intention than that there should be any link of any kind. For, to quote again from the unpublished notes, “The Love Song, ‘O, vere mine lofe a sugar-powl,’ was composed, the first two verses, one night in Philadelphia after going to bed. It was with a great effort that I rose and wrote them down. I lived at the time at Mrs. Sandgren’s in Spruce Street . ” The ballad of De Maiden mit Nodings On “was composed while sitting in a railway carriage, I think in Ohio in 1864. I carried it for a year or more in my memory before I wrote it down.” Wein Geist was written in a letter to Miss D. L. Colton to show “that it was easier to write such rhymes than prose,”— just as a few years later Breitmann in Rome was written in that city for Miss Edith Story. Schnitzerl’s Philosopede was “the result of a suggestion of John Forney, Jr.” “With the exception of the Barty, most of the poems in the first edition were written merely to fill up letters to Charles Astor Bristed,” a fellow journalist living in New York.

But if Breitmann were an accident, it was an accident that could have happened to no other man. Whistler has established beyond contradiction that the picture painted by the artist in a few days may represent the training of a lifetime. And so, the Ballads, knocked off anyhow, were the outcome of a long apprenticeship of study and travel and experience. Otherwise, they would never have developed into a great Breitmann myth. The language alone was not sufficient to ensure their survival, though it counted for more in the days before the rising of the flood of dialect than it could now. It was clever, — uncouth in itself, but pliant and rhythmical as he wrote it. And it was real, not an invention. He had the sense to realize that not only would no two Germans, new to English, speak it alike, but that “no one individual is invariably consistent in his errors or inaccuracies. Every reader who knows any foreign language imperfectly is aware that he speaks it better at one time than another, and it would consequently have been a grave error to reduce the broken and irregular jargon of the book to a fixed and regular language.” The consistency of its inconsistency gave Breitmann’s English a picturesqueness, to which his further experiments in other tongues contributed so flamboyantly that Octave Delapierre, the authority who had defined macaronics as “the extravagance of poetry,” pronounced Breitmann’s Interview with the Pope to be one of the finest examples. If extravagance depends on recklessness or first-rate badness, then “from this point of view,” the author modestly admits, “it is possible that Breitmann’s Latin lyric is not devoid of merit, since assuredly nobody ever wrote a worse.”

But macaronics are for the few; for the many, the cleverness of the German-English would have been no attraction, would, on the contrary, have been a drawback, the many finding it quite hard enough work to read at all, without the additional labor of consulting a glossary. Even the down-East Yankee would have made Hosea Biglow impossible, if Hosea Biglow had not had something to say that people wanted to hear. And Breitmann, too, had something to say, something that his author could not have said as expressively in any other way. Moreover, like all popular types, from Macchus, through the innumerable Pulcinellos and Pierrots, Harlequins and Pantaloons of centuries, Breitmann had in him the elements of human nature. He may have been an alien in America, but he was a man, and a very real man, wherever he might go. He lived in the Ballads; that is why the Ballads have lived.

What the author saw in him, as he gradually grew into a definite, substantial personality, is plainly stated in the author’s preface to the English edition, 1871, — “ one of the battered types of the men of ’48,” beneath whose “unlimited faith in pleasure lie natural shrewdness, an excellent early education, and certain principles of honesty and good fellowship, which are all the more clearly defined from his moral looseness in details, identified in the Anglo-Saxon mind with total depravity;” — or, to quote from a letter to me, a man in whom “ a kind of heroic and romantic grandeur is combined with German naivete and rowdyism.”

In other words, Hans Breitmann, adventurer and vagabond, was as German by nature as by birth; and that was his salvation. Had the Ballads, like the Biglow Papers, been intended to convey a moral satire or preach a patriotic sermon, Breitmann would have been intolerable to Americans; they could not have stood the cynical indifference with which he began his career, by drinking and rioting his way through scenes and events that were so little of a laughing matter to them. But the beauty of Breitmann was that he was not an American. It was possible to look on at the part he took in the great national drama, and still laugh — “the laughter which blends with tears.” Besides, in no native adventurer would there have been the mixture of “philosophy and sentiment, beer, music, and romance” that enabled this one American in particular, with his German training and traditions, to laugh a little at himself, as he laughed with Breitmann. The native adventurer would have left sentiment at home when he went looting, he could not have drunk his beer to the murmur of metaphysics, nor searched for contraband whiskey to the symphonies of Beethoven, nor played the game of politics on the romantic stage. He might, I do not deny, have got “troonk ash bigs” at his own or any other man’s “barty.” But only the German could have moralized at the end of the orgy.

An American in the rôle of “Bummer” may not be inconceivable, but no one could believe in the American “Bummer” who read Fichte, and speculated as to whether

But speculation and argument were as much a habit with the German “Bummer,” as his beer and his pipe, — that is what redeems him from sheer animalism. There is no humor in mere brutality. Breitmann, being a German, when he drank himself drunk on the battlefield, once drunk, could touch the skies. His inspiration might be schnapps, —

but inspired, he could burst into lyrical song: —

He might be the most inveterate looter in the train of a great army, but let the organ peal out

and he was feeling “like holy saints,” and the tears running down his face, while he and his men, “droonk as blitz” on contraband whiskey,—

Whatever Breitmann did,

Wherever he journeyed, he was sure to be

A vagabond of vagabonds, rollicking from adventure to adventure like the hero of the old Picaresque novel, he was a German through it all; the feeling of romance young in his heart, his soul susceptible to the sound of music or the summons of sentiment, the pathos lying very close to the humor, and poetry in the laughter. “I have a letter from Dr. O. W. Holmes in which he says that the death of Von Stossenheim drew two long-tailed tears from his eyes,” is a note written on the margin of Breitmann‛s Going to Church, while George Boker’s admiration for a special verse in the same poem is recorded in another marginal note. And Breitmann’s thoughts were ever soaring so to the Infinite, so many tags of old verse and bits of old legend were ever running through his head, that only those familiar with German philosophy and literature can appreciate the learning crammed into what, to the casual reader, seems mere “comic verse.” And he had, as has been written of him, “a ripe talent for events,” and as it happened, adventure was more than ever in the way of the Philadelphia journalist back from the war, who, in those chaotic times, —profitable for none but the contractor,— found himself, to his own surprise, now oil-prospecting in guerrilla-swept Tennessee; now rent-collecting in the wilds of West Virginia; now off on some great railroad-advertising excursion to Kansas and the then furthermost frontier of civilization, among Indians and buffaloes. And wherever he had to go, sometimes with sad sinking of heart and depression of spirits, he could take Breitmann and carry it off with a laugh.

If the German in Breitmann was beyond the average American’s comprehension, if his “ well-balanced mixture of stoicism and epicurism” was peculiarly Teutonic; still he was so human, such a good fellow, he was so gay in his endurance as in his excess, that every American could understand the man himself, while his humor was of a kind that every American could enjoy, without a suspicion of the discomfort there was in the laugh over Hosea Biglow’s humor. And so, though Breitmann’s creator thought little of him, other people, fortunately, began to think a great deal. The public became conscious of the existence of this big, jolly German with his unquenchable thirst and irrepressible good spirits, and were on the lookout for his reappearance. Letters containing the ballads were preserved by the friends lucky enough to have received them, especially by Bristed, who, after sending his series to a sporting paper, tried to surprise the author with a privately printed collection. The attempt failed. The Ballads might never have appeared at all, it is stated in the preface to the 1871 edition, had not Ringwalt, a collaborator on the Philadelphia Press, also a printer, had such faith in the work as to have it set up in his office, offering to try an edition, which, however, was transferred to Peterson Brothers. In the correspondence of a very much later date, I have come upon a letter (dated March 10, 1896) from an old friend, a fellow journalist on the Press, who tells an amusing story I now publish for the first time, of this printing. “I recall,” he says, “one curious incident that might be worth putting into your second volume of memoirs. In the Breitmann Ballads the compositors frequently made mistakes in setting up the German patois, and you would consider with respect their errors, whether or not to adopt them. I recollect your frequently consulting me on such points, and we would weigh the merits or demerits of their slips — or involuntary scholarship.”

Breitmann, the creature of chance, when he achieved the dignity of publication in book form, took the world by storm. The Petersons, uncertain, I suppose, as to his reception, had begun timidly by issuing the Ballads in parts. But the First was quickly followed by Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth. The publishers, one of the old, highly respectable firms of my native town, showed small consideration for future collectors and bibliographers. Dates — in Breitmann anyway — were nothing to them. But from the year of the copyright entry according to Act of Congress, contemporary letters, and the date of the first English edition, I know that the Ballads were published in 1869, in the little paper-covered “Parts,” of which, to my sorrow, odd numbers only have survived in the far from complete Breitmann collection I have been able to make from the books and papers left by my Uncle to my care. In 1871 the five Parts were collected into a fat, solid, substantially bound volume, but before this they had already gone to England. In a word, Breitmann “flashed” into popularity, as into being. Trübner, who went to the trouble of writing an introduction and extending the glossary, was the authorized English publisher, a note in the English edition signed “Charles Godfrey Leland” and dated “Philadelphia, 1869,” distinctly states. But this made no difference to English publishers, whose virtuous objection to piracy weakened at the point where piracy meant profit to themselves. Two pirated editions appeared in the same year. One of the pirates, in a letter now among my Breitmann papers, suggested that the Ballads should be his because he was the first English publisher of the Biglow Papers, though what Lowell thought of him in that capacity he did not trouble to explain. Both these editions amiably presented Breitmann with a ballad he could not have claimed had he wanted to, and both published an introduction that almost reconciles me to-day to the piracy. For, in accounting for Breitmann, it explains that, “already the English language in America has become to some extent Germanized. Thus, all the familiar words in German speech, the questions and answers of every-day life and the names of common objects, are as well known and recognized among all classes throughout the Union as the coins of Prussia and Austria are current and acceptable tender;” and I have no doubt the Englishman, upon whom it had not then dawned that complete ignorance of everything American might turn out a bad investment, closed the book confirmed in his disdain of a country where people talked such barbarous English. “Hans Breitmann a donné une soirée, où est cette soirée maintenant? où est l’aimable nuage d’or qui flottait au front de la montagne? Où est l’étoile qui brillait au ciel, lumiere de l’esprit ? Tous sont passés comme la bonne bière, passés dans l’éternité.”

In England, as in America, Breitmann went into edition after edition, in “Parts,” and “Complete.” He himself appeared on the popular stage, and songs were made of his ballads. I have the music of the Maiden mit Nodings On, dedicated to the Crichton Club. His name was given to the cigars smoked by the many, and it was borrowed for their work by the few who, no doubt, hoped to find in it a passport to fame. I have a curious little pamphlet called De Gospel according to Saint Breitmann (1871), the first number in a series of Ramequins by “Cullen Morfe,” — of whom and his Ramequins I know no more, and, taking this number as a sample, I think it likely that more is not worth knowing. I have also the second and third numbers (the first, alas, missing) of a paper called Hans Breitmann, a weekly after the pattern of Punch, started in the same year (1871): poor stuff as I try to read it now, but for a moment threatening to be serious in its consequences. For there were critics of the time, too obtuse to distinguish between the real and the sham, who declared that the joke was being carried too far, that the British public was not going to stand a surfeit, even of Hans Breitmann, and that Mr. Leland might as well know it; and to Mr. Leland, Trübner in a panic sent one of these criticisms posthaste. “It is written in such a nasty spirit,” the accompanying letter says, “that I think you should not pass it over in silence. As the continued identification of your name with the Hans Breitmann periodical, which in its last number is exceedingly weak and shallow, could possibly damage you, will you not publicly disclaim all connection with it, perhaps in a letter to the Athenæum?”

I am not sure if the letter was written, but Trübner’s panic seems the less necessary in the face of other and worse things Breitmann had to face, — the indignation of Germany, for instance, and the praise of France. It was his exploit as Uhlan, included in the 1871 complete edition of the Ballads, that roused Germany’s indignation. “This poem,” says one of those little marginal notes that are invaluable in the authentic history of Breitmann, “gave offence to many Germans, even to those who had been in the war.” But the author’s preface in 1871 had already protested: “It is needless, perhaps, to say that I no more intended to ridicule or satirize the German cause or the German method of making war . . . than I did those of the American Union, when I first introduced Breitmann as a ‘Bummer’ plundering the South.” However, most people, if they must be laughed at, would rather do the laughing themselves, and after 1870 the Germans, in the pride of conquest, would probably have resented their own laughter. As to the praise, it took the form of translation by Théodore Bentzon, who was writing a series of articles on “Les Humoristes Américains” for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and undertook to introduce Breitmann to French readers (August, 1872). I do not suppose, in the whole course of his career, Breitmann could ever have felt himself so complete a stranger as at his own “Barty” transformed into a soirée, and I quote the first and last verses to show how severe may sometimes be the penalty of praise.

“Hans Breitmann a donné une soirée; on y a joué du piano. J’y tombai amoureux d’une Américaine; son nom était Mathilde Jane; elle avait des cheveux bruns cendrés comme un craquelin; ses yeux étaient bleu de ciel; lorsqu’ils regardaient dans les miens, ils fendaient mon cœur en deux.”

When the Breitmann excitement was at its height, the author of the Ballads, who had broken down from years of overwork, and who had now, by the death of his father, come into an independent fortune, arrived in London. He was received with no less enthusiasm than Breitmann; indeed was received as Hans Breitmann, — the one “thorn in his cushion,” for he resented nothing so much as being identified with the disreputable old adventurer, who was no more like him than the Heathen Chinee was like Bret Harte. “Breitmann has become my autocrat who rules me with a rod of iron, and has imposed his accursed name on me — and thou helpest him!” he wrote once to Mr. Fisher Unwin, who, publishing his photograph, had printed “Hans Breitmann” below. Indeed, knowing him as I did, I can fancy him wincing even under that prettily turned welcome from Dr. Holmes. A more cordial reception was seldom given to an American in England in the days before the English had begun to talk of the “ blood that is thicker than water,” and to sentimentalize over the entente cordiale. The miracle is, how Breitmann survived, — a smaller success has crushed many verses as gay. But Breitmann had the secret of perennial youth, he was a true cosmopolite. That was why he retained his freshness in every fresh adventure found for him by the Rye, — really, I can no longer call my Uncle by any other name, for it was while Breitmann was winning him fame in England that, on the English roads, he was beginning his Romany studies and making himself known and loved as “the Rye,” not only by every Gypsy in the land, but by his friends; it was the name I best knew him by, and probably half the letters to him that have VOL. 95 - NO. 1 come into my hands begin “My dear Rye.” The Rye, then, could send his hero everywhere he went himself, without risk of repetition. He had already set Breitmann to singing a Gypsy song, had sent him back to Munich Bier Kellers and to the Latin Quarter haunts, had started him on travels through Belgium and Holland, down the Rhine, to Rome. But I have always thought that Breitmann’s vitality never asserted itself so triumphantly as in 1882, when the Rye was back in Philadelphia and Philadelphia was celebrating its Bicentennial, with a big Bicycle Meet among other ceremonies. To this Meet, or its dinner, or reception, or whatever its very special function may have been, my husband (not yet my husband) invited the Rye, as the author of the first bicycle poem: Schnitzerl’s Philosopede of fifteen years earlier. The Rye, who, socially, was just then living a hermit’s life, refused, but to make up for it wrote for the occasion two new verses, practically a third part to the poem, and made a drawing of Breitmann on his “crate philosopede.” Whoever has read Breitmann remembers this philosopede, a copy of Schnitzerl’s wonderful original:—

The ballad is one of the best and gayest, one in which Breitmann surpassed even himself in his philosophical flights and lyrical outbursts. It was therefore with delight that I chanced upon the rough copy of the two new verses, and, as they have never been printed before, I am glad to print them now. Schnitzerl’s philosopede, it will be recalled, had

But the new verses explain that —

The whole Incident pleased the Rye. When, in 1885, he wrote an introduction in verse for the account my husband and I had made of a tricycle ride from Florence to Rome, he boasted in it that he

And in the 1889 edition of Breitmann, the marginal note to Schnitzerl’s Philosopede ends by saying, “I believe it is the first bicycle poem ever written.” I do not know why the success of Breitmann’s prophecy should have put him in the mood to write Breitmann‛s Last Ballad, but in the year of this introduction (1885) he wrote for Mrs. Alec Tweedie, then Miss Ethel B. Harley, what he called Breitmann’s Allerletztes Lied ,which also — as far as I know — has never been printed before. Here are two verses, the first and last: —

But it was by no means the last of Breitmann, though in his gallantry he might have liked to think so. An adventurer of his type does not go out with a compliment on his lips. There was other work to do. He went to Turkey, he tried his luck in California and his hand at Gypsy and Witch ballads, and he had five new adventures, or poems, to add to the 1889 edition. Memories of his old Barty haunted him, and another verse for it is written on the margin of the 1871 annotated edition. It should not be left unpublished, though the Barty may “reach de perfect” without it.

And Breitmann went to the Tyrol, in the more peaceful occupation of courier or guide, and wrote a whole book about it, mostly in prose, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin in 1895. Beer flows freely in the Tyrol, and Breitmann’s spirits always flow as freely with it. But somehow, this Breitmann book does not give the same impression of reckless enjoyment, perhaps because of the prose, or perhaps because the old “Bummer” and “ Uhlan” was cast down by the mildness of his new adventures. And Breitmann even had an eye to affairs in South Africa. For the Rye, a very old man in Florence when the Boer War broke out, in looking back to his many years in England, remembered only the pleasures they had brought him, and sent, as his special envoy to the English, Breitmann, with a word of sympathy. These verses were published in Flaxius (1902), a book brought out a few months before his death. There they were called Breitmann‛s Last Ballad, and this time they really were. Breitmann has passed through his last adventure, through his last debauch of beer and pure reason. But he still lives, he surely always will live as long as the American retains his sense of humor, and that will be as long as America is — America.