HANS BREITMANN AND HOSEA. BILLOW.

THE new poems of Hans Breitmann,* which in humour are quite up to the standard of those which we have from time to time reviewed, naturally suggest a comparison with those of Hosea Biglow, the other great American humourist's fic- titious hero ; in other words, it is almost impossible not to compare the humour of Mr. Leland with the humour of Mr. Lowell,—so many points have they of likeness, so many of differ- ence. Mr. Leland's principal hero is a grasping, drinking, plun- dering, fighting, sentimental, German in the Northern Army. Mr. Lowell's, indeed, is an honest Northern farmer, but then he has a subordinate hero, Birdofredum Sawin, almost as important, who is a grasping, drinking, plundering, but not fighting, and still less sentimental Yankee of the 'cutest and Cop- periest kind in the South. Each of these,—Hans Breitmann and Birdofredum Sawin,—in effect reflects a certain amount of discredit on the cause he took up ; in each the humour consists in a very large degree in the happy choice of dialect, and the familiarities of speech and thought and illustration which are at the writer's finger-ends ; and in each again, humorous exaggera- tion and caricature play a most important part. Yet nothing can well be more different in general effect than the humour of the Biglow papers and of Hans Breit- mann's ballads. Mr. Lowell's is in the strictest sense original —you can liken it to nothing else on earth. Mr. Leland's, though perfectly original in conception, indeed, of his own sole invention, is yet in genus more or less borrowed from Heinrich Heine's wonderful mockeries. Again, Mr. Lowell's humour is all based on the deepest faith. In the grotesquest of his religions familiarities, you always see that it is not disbelief, but profound belief which makes him handle his subject so familiarly,—like the absolute belief which Father Newman says permits the Roman Catholic almost to joke about his saints and the Madonna. Mr. Leland's sarcasms are essentially of the mocking kind. He mocks at sentiment till he makes us feel as Heine makes us feel, as if all the emotions of human nature were weak- nesses based upon superstition. He laughs at intellectual truth, at moral truth, at spiritual truth. German transcendentalism is one of his favourite themes of mockery ; German fidelity another ; German faith a third. As you laugh over Hans Breit- mann,—.and no one with any sense of humour can help laughing over him,—you frequently feel that you are laughing, like Heine, at all that is worth living for, mocking at yourself for your best thoughts, even more than for your worst. We could hardly assert, perhaps, that the humour of the Breitmann ballads is as great as that of the Biglow papers, for the Biglow papers are almost unapproachable in the overflow and richness of their • Hans Breitatann in Church, with other Ballads. By Charles G. Leland. London :

TrUbner. humour. But undoubtedly, the Breitmann ballads come very near them in mere literary merit, while in all other respects they fall far short of the earlier work. They show none of the deep practical sagacity of the Biglow papers ; none of their profound earnestness, none of their poetical tenderness. At the same time, they have perhaps even more bouyancy, more animal spirits, and more of universal application, being in reality satires on certain universal elements in human nature, while the Biglow papers are satires on the selfishness of a particular school of American poli- ticians at a particular epoch.

But to come to a more detailed comparison. Both Mr. Lowell and Mr. Leland (like Artemus Ward, and we imagine all other

American humourists), we have said, have shown the most delicate feeling for the humour of dialect,—the new-made provincial idiom

in which you see language in the act of being moulded fresh to the hand of a 'cute and careless generation. How free a use Mr.

Lowell's heroes make, for instance, of the foreign words in the English language, and how happily they fit the 'cute Yankees who have recast them to their own purpose ! Take this :— " Bat Jeff he hit upon a way o' helping on us forrard, By bein' unannermous—a trick you ain't quite up to Norrard. A baldin hain't no more 'f a chance with these new apple corers Than folks's oppersition views aginst the Ringtail Roarer& ; They'll take 'em out on him 'bout East,—one canter on a rail. Makes a man feel unannermous ez Jonah in the whale."

Or this :— "I've noticed thet each half-baked scheme's abettors Are in the habbit o' producin' letters, Writ by all sorts o' never-hqrd-on fellers 'Bout as oridgenal ez the wind in boilers ; I've noticed tu, it's the quack med'cines gits (An' needs) the grettest heap o' stiffykits."

The effect of all this Yankee dialect is to express in the moss marvellous way,—a way that no provincial English dialect (York- shire, or Lincolnshire, or Dorsetshire, or what you please to take) in the least gives,—the sense of familiarity, of the full right to take liberties, with language which the Yankee feels. He is quite familiar with the words he uses, is not out of his depth in the least in using them ; unanimous' and ' certificates,' and all such words, are just as familiar to him as any others, but be chooses to make them suit his mouth instead of suiting his mouth to them,.

and hence the easy, slovenly, undress fashion in which they come out ; hence, too, the multitude of artificial nick-names,—like Ringtail Roarers ' in the above extract,—like the multitude of political nick-names, such as ' Silver Grey Filmore Whigs,'—and

so forth,—and hence, too, the cool adaptation of old Roman and Greek names, Troy, and Corinth, and Athens, to the oddest little villages. In Mr. Lowell's dialect you see the Yankee coolly kneading the language to suit the most temporary exigencies of his mouth. With Hans Breitmann the reason for the choice of dialect, like the

dialect itself, is quite different. That chosen is the Pennsylvanian- German, skilfully moulded into guttural greediness and shibboleths of sentiment. Take this, for instance :— " 0 vere mine lofe a sugar-powl, De fery shmallest loomp Vouldt shveet de seas from pole to pole Und make de shildren shoomp ;" " So livin white, so carnadine Mine lofe's gomplexion show,"

where the guttural in gomplexion' lends a greedy and cannibal- istic expression to the word, and the soft sh's and f's, instead

of j's and v's, give a quite unique sense of an epicurish revelling in the flavours of sensation. The dialect of Mr. Leland's heroes expresses none of the easy familiarity with words which the Yankee dialect of Mr. Lowell expresses. On the contrary, you feel that the slow and sensual but omnivorous German-Yankees of his satires pick their way with difficulty through the labyrinths of speech, and feel their limits painfully, as they grope after the delineation of their voracious appetites and insatiable sentiments.

The type of extravagance and caricature in which both writers delight is much less different, has much more that is common in it. In the Biglow papers we have an ample supply of such illus- trations, as the following, for instance, comparing the tropical rains of the rainy season to our Prudence's ' unmanageable teapot :-

" The clymit seems to me just like a teapot made o' pewter

Our Prudence led, that wouldn't pour (all she could du) to snit her ; Fust place the leaves 'ould choke the spout, so's not a drop 'ould dreen out Then Prude 'onld tip an' tip an' tip till the Noll kit bust clean out, The kiver-hinge-pin bein' lost, tea leaves an' tea an' kiver

'Onld all come down kersivosh ez though the dam broke in a river. Jest so 'tis here ; boll months there ain't a day o' rainy weather, An' just ez th' officers 'ould be alayin' heads together

or this,—

Ez t'how they'd mix their drinks at sech a milingtary deepot,— 'Twould pour oz though the lid wuz off the everlasting tea-pot."

That bold conception of 'the everlasting teapot' is most charac- teristic of the American humour, which delights in magnifying the humblest and homeliest things with the view of humiliating, as it were, the grander and more ideal phenomena to which it com- pares them. Now, Hans Breitmann's extravagance and caricature are different in tone, but not in rationale. He affects to use the most familiar and ludicrous expressions as if they were full of sentiment :—

" Vere is die loettle leettle shtar, The shtar of the spirit's light, All runned any mit de Lagar Bier, Afay in de Ewigkeit ;"

—or thus, in praising his lady-love :— " Her heafenly foice, it drill me so It oft-dimes seems to hoort,

She ish de holiest animile Dst roons upon de dirt.

De renpow rises when she sings, De sonnshein vhen she dalk, .De angels crow and flop deir vings Vhen she goes out to yolk."

Except that this is cast in a tone of mock sentiment, the conception of it is very much the same as that of the extravagances of the Biglow papers,—the secret being the close association of the most homely illustrations with the least homely ; but it is done with the sardonic laugh of Heine behind it, instead of the keen dry smile of Yankee amusement.

As to the intellectual drift of the thoughts expressed in the Biglow papers and the Breitmann ballads respectively, they are as different as possible. The Big'ow papers from beginning to end are meant to exalt justice, simplicity, integrity, mercy, as the very soul of politics, and take the true measure of the bragga- docio, cunning, selfishness, cruelty which call themselves by high- sounding names. The first of all of them was a spirited protest against the Mexican war, which the Slave party had pressed on in the hope of increasing the Slave-State element in the Union,—and this note runs through the whole series :-

" WA go 'long to help 'em dentin' Bigger pens to cram with slaves, Help the men that's oilers dealin' Insults on your fathers' graves ; Help the strong to grind the feeble, Help the many agin the few, Help the men thet call you people Witewashed slaves au' peddlin' crew !'

This drift sometimes takes the form of direct invective, and some- times,—in Birdofredum Sawin's letters,—of bitter sarcasm ; but it is always ethically the same, and the only real diversification of it is the genuine love of nature which bursts out from time to time in noble descriptions like the following of the New England spring, "that gives one leap from April into June ":—

" Then all comes crowdin' in; afore you think The oak-buds mist the side-hill woods with pink, The cat-bird in the laylock bush is loud, The orchards turn to heaps o' rosy cloud, In ellum-shrouds the flashin' hangbird clings An' for the summer vy'ge his hammock slings, All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers

The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers 'Nuff sod, June's bridesman, poet o' the year, Gladness on wings, the bobolink is here ; Half hid in tip-top apple blooms he swings Or climbs against the breeze with quivering wings, Or givin' way to 't in a mock despair Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air."

In passages of this kind, no less than in the whole moral tone which pervades the Biglow papers, you see what really feeds the genius of the writer, and that a genuine faith in Divine government and a genuine love of the spirit which creates the beauty of the universe, is the master-key to all the grotesque humour and sarcasm of the ballads. In the Breitmann ballads it is very different.

Mockery is the real master-spirit. The hunger for sausages and sentiment, for lager-bier and love, for widows and wassail, for battle and booty, has nothing behind or beneath it except a real contempt for the human nature which thus manifests itself. Breitmann and his party breaking into a church and getting drunk half on whiskey and half on maudlin sentiment, is typical of the whole ballads :—

"Derefore a Aliserere

Vilt don, be-ghostet, spiel, Und yaks be-raised yearnin' Also a holy feel, Pe referent, men—rememper Dis WI a Gotteshans-

Du Conrad, go along de aisles Und schenk de whiskey aus."

Scoffs like this, full of humour, but of humour with no heart in them, such scoffs as Byron sowed thick in " Don Juan," and Heine in all his exquisite poems, are of the very substance of the Breit- mann ballads. Even the feeling for Nature which Mr. Leland, like Heine, has very keenly, is used for the same mocking purpose. Thus, in a little ballad meant to make fun of the old chivalric impossibilities which knights undertook as the condition of winning their lady-loves, the influences of Nature acting upon the knight, Sir Steinli von Slang, after he has just been assured of success by a favouring goblin, are thus described :—

" De foist shdars vero apofe him,

Vhite moths and vhite dotes shimmered round, All nature seemed seeking to lofe him Alit perfume and vision and sound.

De liddle oldt yeller hat fanisbed In a harp-like, melotious, twang; Und mit him all sorrow vas panished Afay from der Steinli von Slang."

In this, as in others of Mr. Leland's satirical ballads, there is real feeling for Nature overlying the mockery, but not underlying it. Like Heine, he hardly likes to express it without a harsh laugh at himself for his pains. Mr. Leland, with a humour which falls short indeed, but not very much short, of Mr. Lowell's, always contrives to leave a disagreeable taste behind the laughter which he provokes,—Mr. Lowell always a sense of the wisdom beneath the fancy, and the truth behind the smile.