Sara Chapman Thorp Bull

“ That Ole Bull’s success on Saturday evening was very great, it is unnecessary to say; for no audience (except the French) , however critical and severe, can escape the electrical touch of his genius. One word, one glance, one sweep, if it is informed with magnetic power, leaves all rules in the rear, and asserts its own supremacy. Here is the characteristic and charm of Ole Bull. Like Paganini, he is an exceptional person. Like every man of remarkable and pronounced genius, he is a phenomenon. He is his own standard; he makes his own rules. ”

“ C’est un honnête jeune homme sans charlatanisme, qui ignore le grand art Italien de préparer un succès de longue main. Depuis le premier jour ou je l’entendis à l’opéra, en toute admiration, je l’avoue, le hasard me l’a fait entendre souvent çà et là, sur toutes les grandes routes et sur tous les théâtres de province, et toujours cependant j’ai retrouvé le même talent, la même inspiration passionée et le même enthousiasme naïf et plein de cœur. Un jour dans une auberge de Rouen, j’ai été réveillé par un adagio melancolique et tendre, c’était le violon d’Ole Bull. ”

“ Dear Friend,—We are all sitting around our centre table; the blaze of the fire flickering on the walls, and enlivening the hearth. We are recalling the pleasant hours spent in Hartford. My husband says to me—Did you indeed see Ole Bull? He has always been one of my ideals—how I wish he would come here! Why, says I, he did promise to come, perhaps:—so you see that you are not forgotten. Do not, my dear friend, despair of human nature—nor wholly despair of America; the experience of the past has shivered so many brilliant illusions. ”

“ Bull’s height in his stocking–feet is five feet eleven and a quarter inches. As he stands before an audience waiting for his accompaniment, with his small waist, his superb bust, his finely cut face, and the carriage of a prince, he is the incarnation of the Magnus Apollo. But when his imperial bow grows liquid and pours out silvery notes like the music of many waters, we seem to see as in a dream that the wheel of Ixion stops, the stone of Sisyphus stands still, Tantalus forgets his perpetual thirst, and even the Furies relent. ”

“ He had not subsided from the gush and sparkle of life into the sediment of a form or stalagmite of a creed. The crystallization went on unfinished in the upper chambers of his soul, and had no cavern like the stalactites of the mine in which to drop. No decay gave hint of an end. There is sickness, death, but no end. He grew, advanced, never stopped, nor did the sutures, even at seventy, quite close over that busy brain. “To have to work so at my age!” said the French painter, Thomas Couture; but Ole Bull said, “I should vegetate without new engagements to fulfill.” ”

“ They surrender only to majestic power. Hence we have the strange spectacle of an immense [219] and miscellaneous audience hanging enchanted upon this wondrous bow, through performances of a length which, in itself, would be enough to wreck most success. Like the voice of an orator speaking for a people its hopes, its indignation, its pity and sorrow, so this violin sings for those who listen their own shifting, wild, and vague fancies. It is because the artist magnetizes them, for the time, and they think and dream as he chooses. ”

“ The Norwegian made his appearance last evening at Dodsworth Hall, and once more exercised his spell of musical witchery over a crowded audience. His well–known identity with his violin, playing on it as if the strings of his heart were strained over it, seems to be as perfect as ever, while the new story that his heart has to tell—the troubles and reverses he has undergone since he last played among us—seems to be faithfully added to its expression. ”

“ My calling in this world is the Norse music. I am no painter, no sculptor, no writer. I am a musician, and, being one, I ought to be trusted when I say that I hear a wonderfully deep and characteristic sound–board vibrating in the breasts of my people. The desire of my life has been to give it strings; that it may find voice, and its deep tones penetrate the temple as Norway’s church music bears the words of the minister to the hearts of the congregation ”

“ The violin in Ole Bull’s hands is a perfect orchestra, and an impetuous torrent of delightful harmonies; it seems as if the strings multiply themselves, and, obedient to the inspiration of the artist, they as well imitate the human voice as the trumpet of the warrior, the song of the maiden, or the lyre of the poet. We have heard nothing so magical, seducing, and astonishing. ”

“ Older men have told you of the giant form which suddenly stood forth, not in the low, no, in the highest places, before kings and the most cultured, and played with a wild power, possessed by only one man before, but in Ole Bull more original, more humanly sympathetic,—a power for the first time Norse. When they read how he stood and sang Norwegian melodies from his violin to other nations, we felt that they were one with us while they were moved to laughter and tears as they caught glimpses back of him of our people and grand, beautiful nature ”

“ These men were there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim. And it is not irreverent to say, that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving hands of Norway peasants. ”

“ The sad ride to Bergen was happily brightened by the sun. The steamer, on entering the large fjord which lies outside the harbor, was met by a convoy of sixteen steamers, ranged on either side—a wonderfully impressive escort. As the fleet approached the harbor slowly, guns fired from the fort and answered by the steamers echoed and reëchoed among the mountains. The harbor and shipping were covered with flags of all nations, at half–mast, the whole world paying its last tribute to a genius which the whole world had learned to know and love. ”

“ But a young generation came, nourished on freedom, and without the fear and prudence of their elders, but with more of defiance, more of anger. They lived in the morning of freedom and honor, and in this dawn came Ole Bull’s tones like the first rays of the sun over the mountain tops.
At that time the folk–melodies invaded our music, the democratic invaded the aristocratic, the national the abstract, the individual the formulated ideal. To our honor be it said, we followed. ”

“ When not playing there is nothing observable in his appearance, except genuine health, the unconscious calmness of strength in repose, and the most unaffected simplicity in dress and in manner. But when he takes his violin and holds it so caressingly to his ear to catch the faint vibration of its strings, it seems as if “the angels were whispering to him.” As his fingers sweep across the strings, the angels pass into his soul, give him their tones, and look out from his eyes, with the wondrous beauty of inspiration. His motions sway to the music like a tree in the winds ”

“ In the association of the New England Women’s Club, Ole Bull will long be remembered as a kind friend, as a distinguished artist, and as a personality unique and charming. He was at once cosmopolitan and patriotic. He loved his own country, and loved ours also, which became his by a sort of adoption. He was a lover at once of art and of humanity, and deserves a place in the record of those who unite skill with sympathy, the artist’s cunning with the frank loving nature of the child. ”

“ Recalling what the presence and music of Ole Bull were to Alice Cary in her comparative health and fullness of life, you can realize what they must have been to charm and uplift her spirit when, wistfully dropping human loves, with pathetic grief, yet with abiding faith, she stood at the very close of the valley of shadows, listening to his seraphic strains, sweet to pain, yet full of the promise and melody of heaven. ”

“ In these modern times, they have sent us Swedenborg, that deep in–seeing prophet, as yet imperfectly understood, either by disciples or opponents; and Frederika Bremer, gliding like sun–warmth into the hearts of many nations; and Thorwaldsen, with his serene power and majestic grace; and Beethoven, with aspirations that leap forth beyond the “flaming bounds of time and space;” and Ole Bull, with the primeval harmonies of creation vibrating through his soul in infinite variations. ”

“ It remains to consider Ole Bull not only as an artist and patriot, but man; for, beyond all else, he was humane, cosmopolite, a citizen of the world, and did not distinguish himself, save by genius which he could not help, from other men, but was in union and close communion with all; and detract as we may from a man’s talents, or criticise as we will his accomplishments, the fact of a great wide and common love for him and from him cannot be set aside. ”

“ Why, I inquired of him, do the manufacturers of violins not illustrate the law of evolution, and make as good instruments at least as Stradivarius, Amati, and Gaspar da Salo? “Because,” he answered, “they do not consider it a holy mission.” Earnest in his nature, like the hot geysers of the North, he was as winsome in his manners as any prince of the East; and, I doubt not, a true test would detect blood of the Orient in his veins, as he said he learned from Italy what it is to sing. ”

“ It grows on the Italian side of the Alps; for sunshine [128] and song seem inseparably connected, and the balmy atmosphere which makes Italy so rich in music, and imparts to her language such liquid melody, seems breathed into her trees. Those acquainted with music are well aware that the value of an instrument is prodigiously increased by the age of the wood, and that the purity of its tone depends very much on the skillfulness of the hand which has played upon it. ”

“ In Norway, at present, steam draws a broad furrow across the land. It whistles on the railroad; it plies on the lakes; it knocks thrice at the mountain, and the mountain–king, opening his gate, admits the broad light of day, in which, according to the legends of old, he must die. Already the lovers of song complain of its retreat, and, following it to remote valleys, watch its dying lips to set it down in notes. But meanwhile a great representative of Nature’s music, of the people’s song, had gone forth to the wide world,—Ole Bull. ”

“ We have talked of the dream cherished in common by all Norse artists: the coming home and uniting all the forces in schools in which the national art could be developed to an independent manhood, and Norway be given the honor which foreigners now take from her. When these longings become too intense for control, the exiles fly haphazard home—painters, sculptors, and musicians striking against the old, gray, naked cliffs of their country’s insensibility. ”

“ It is useless to pursue him with the traditional rules. His orbit will not be prescribed or prophesied, for it is eccentric. In all that he does, the traditional temperament of genius betrays itself. He is tremulous and tender, but also rugged and stern, and strong as his native mountains. He is no unapt type of his Norway, with its sunny but [218] breezy heights, with its dark and solemn depths, and, over all, the clear, blue heaven. In his mien and manner, in his music and his playing, the same thing is constantly felt. ”