The king was startled by this curt rebuke, and was about to make an angry reply, but smoothed his face and answered, with a laugh:
"Well! well! I know you d—d sturdy fellows." Carl Johann afterward bestowed on Ole Bull the order of Gustavus Vasa.
V.
Ole Bull's first visit to America was in 1843, and the impression produced by his playing was, for manifest causes, even greater than that created in Europe. He was the first really great violinist who had ever come to this country for concert purposes, and there was none other to measure him by. There were no great traditions of players who had preceded him; there were no rivals like Spohr, Paganini, and De Bériot to provoke comparisons. In later years artists discovered that this country was a veritable El Dorado, and regarded an American tour as indispensable to the fulfillment of a well-rounded career. But, when Ole Bull began to play in America, his performances were revelations, to the masses of those that heard him, of the possibilities of the violin. The greatest enthusiasm was manifested everywhere, and, during the three years of this early visit, he gave repeated performances in every city of any note in America. The writer of this little work met Ole Bull a few years ago in Chicago, and heard the artist laughingly say that, when he first entered what was destined to be such a great city, it was little more than a vast mudhole, a good-sized village scattered over a wide space of ground, and with no building of pretension except Fort Dearborn, a stockade fortification.
Our artist returned to Europe in 1846, and for five years led a wandering life of concert-giving in England, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain, adding to his laurels by the recognition everywhere conceded of the increased soundness and musicianly excellence of his playing. It was indeed at this period that Ole Bull attained his best as a virtuoso. He had been previously seduced by the example of Paganini, and in the attempt to master the more strange and remote difficulties of the instrument had often laid himself open to serious criticism. But Ole Bull gradually formed a style of his own which was the outcome of his passion for descriptive and poetic playing, and the correlative of the mode of composition which he adopted. In still later years Ole Bull seems to have returned again to what might be termed claptrap and trickery in his art, and to have desired rather to excite wonder and curiosity than to charm the sensibilities or to satisfy the requirements of sound musical taste.
In 1851 Ole Bull returned home with the patriotic purpose of establishing a strictly national theatre. This had been for a long time one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, proved only an insatiable tax on money-resources earned in other directions.
The year succeeding this, Ole Bull again visited the United States, and spent five years here. The return to America did not altogether contemplate the pursuit of music, for there had been for a good while boiling in his brain, among other schemes, the project of a great Scandinavian colony, to be established in Pennsylvania under his auspices. He purchased one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of land on the Susquehanna, and hundreds of sturdy Norwegians flocked over to the land of milk and honey thus auspiciously opened to them. Timber was felled, ground cleared, churches, cottages, school-houses built, and everything was progressing desirably, when the ambitious colonizer discovered that the parties who sold him the land were swindlers without any rightful claim to it. With the unbusiness-like carelessness of the man of genius, our artist had not investigated the claims of others on the property, and he thus became involved in a most perplexing and expensive suit at law. He attempted to punish the rascals who so nearly ruined him, but they were shielded behind the quips and quirks of the law, and got away scot free. Ole Bull's previously ample means were so heavily drained by this misfortune that he was compelled to take up his violin again and resume concert-giving, for he had incurred heavy pecuniary obligations that must be met. Driven by the most feverish anxiety, he passed from town to town, playing almost every night, till he was stricken down by yellow fever in New Orleans. His powerful frame and sound constitution, fortified by the abstemious habits which had marked his whole life of queer vicissitudes, carried him through this danger safely, and he finally succeeded in honorably fulfilling the responsibility which he had assumed toward his countrymen.
For many recent years Ole Bull, when not engaged in concert-giving in Europe or America, has resided at a charming country estate on one of the little islands off the coast of Norway. His numerous farewell concert tours are very well known to the public, and would have won him ridicule, had not the genial presence and brilliant talents of the Norwegian artist been always good for a renewed and no less cordial welcome. He frequently referred to the United States in latter years as the beloved land of his adoption. One striking proof of his preference was, at all events, displayed in his marriage to an American lady, Miss Thorpe, of Wisconsin, in 1870. One son was the fruit of this second marriage, and Mr. and Mrs. Ole Bull divided their time between Norway and the United States.
The magnificent presence of Ole Bull, as if of some grand old viking stepped out of his armor and dressed in modern garb, made a most picturesque personality. Those who have seen him can never forget him. The great stature, the massive, stalwart form, as upright as a pine, the white floating locks framing the ruddy face, full of strength and genial humor, lit up by keen blue eyes—all these things made Ole Bull the most striking man in personnel among all the artists who have been familiar to our public.
While Ole Bull will not be known in the history of art as a great scientific musician, there can be no doubt that his place as a brilliant and gifted solo player will stand among the very foremost. As a composer he will probably be forgotten, for his compositions, which made up the most of his concert programmes, were so radically interwoven with his executive art as a virtuoso that the two can not be dissevered. No one, unless he should be inspired by the same feelings which animated the breast of Ole Bull, could ever evolve from his musical tone-pictures of Scandinavian myth and folk-lore the weird fascination which his bow struck from the strings. Ole Bull, like Paganini, laid no claim to greatness in interpreting the violin classics. His peculiar title to fame is that of being, aside from brilliancy as a violin virtuoso, the musical exponent of his people and their traditions. He died at Bergen, Norway, on August 18, 1880, in the seventy-first year of his age, and his funeral services made one of the most august and imposing ceremonials held for many a long year in Norway.