University of Virginia Library

OLE BULL'S NIAGARA.
(AN HOUR BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE.)

Saddle, as, of course, we are, under any very striking
event, we find ourselves bestridden, now and then,
with a much wider occupancy than the plumb-line
of a newspaper column. Ole Bull possesses us over
our tea-table; he will possess us over our supper-table—his
performance of Niagara equi-distant between
the two. We must think of him and his violin for
this coming hour. Let us take pen and ink into our
confidence.

The “origin of the harp” has been satisfactorily
recorded. We shall not pretend to put forward a
credible story of the origin of the violin; but we wish
to name a circumstance in natural history. The
house-cricket that chirps upon our hearth, is well
known as belonging to the genus Pneumora. Its insect
size consists almost entirely of a pellucid abdomen,

crossed with a number of transverse ridges. This,
when inflated, resembles a bladder, and upon its tightened
ridges the insect plays like a fiddler, by drawing
its thin legs over them. The cricket is, in fact, a
living violin; and as a fiddler is “scarce himself”
without his violin, we may call the cricket a stray
portion of a fiddler.

Ole Bull “is himself” with his violin before him—
but without it, the commonest eye must remark that
he is of the invariable build of the restless searchers
after something lost—the build of enthusiasts—that is
to say, chest enormous, and stomach, if anything,
rather wanting! The great musician of Scripture, it
will be remembered, expressed his mere mental affliction
by calling out “My bowels! my bowels!” and,
after various experiments on twisted silk, smeared
with the white of eggs, and on single threads of the
silk-worm, passed through heated oil, the animal fibre
of cat-gut has proved to be the only string that answers
to the want of the musician. Without trying to reduce
these natural phenomena to a theory (except by
suggesting that Ole Bull may very properly take the
cricket as an emblem of his instinctive pursuit), we
must yield to an ominous foreboding for this evening.
The objection to cat-gut as a musical string is its
sensibility to moisture; and in a damp atmosphere it
is next to impossible to keep it in tune. The string
comes honestly enough by its sensitiveness (as any
one will allow who has seen a cat cross a street after
a shower)—but, if the cat of Ole Bull's violin had the
least particle of imagination in her, can what is left of
her be expected to discourse lovingly of her natural
antipathy—a water-fall?

But—before we draw on our gloves to go over to
Palmo's—a serious word as to what is to be attempted
to-night.

Old Bull is a great creature. He is fitted, if ever
mortal man was, to represent the attendant spirit in
Milton, who

but it seems to us that, without a printed programme,
showing what he intends to express besides the mere
sound of waters, he is trusting far too rashly to the
comprehension of his audience and their power of
musical interpretation. He is to tell a story by music!
Will it be understood?

We remember being very much astonished, a year
or two ago, at finding ourself able to read the thoughts
of a lady of this city, as she expressed them in an admirable
improvisation upon the piano. The delight
we experienced in this surprise induced us to look
into the extent to which musical meaning had been
perfected in Europe. We found it recorded that a
Mons. Sudre, a violinist of Paris, had once brought
the expression of his instrument to so nice a point
that he “could convey information to a stranger in
another room,” and it is added that, upon the evidence
thus given of the capability of music, it was proposed
to the French government to educate military bands
in the expression of orders and heroic encouragements
in battle! Hayden is criticised by a writer on music
as having failed in attempting (in his great composition
“The Seasons”) to express “the dawn of day,”
“the husbandman's satisfaction,” “the rustling of
leaves,” “the running of a brook,” “the coming on
of winter,” “thick fogs,” etc., etc. The same writer
laughs at a commentator on Mozart, who, by a “second
violin quartette in D minor,” imagines himself
informed how a loving female felt on being abandoned,
and thought the music fully expressed that it was
Dido! Beethoven undertook to convey distinct pictures
in his famous Pastoral Symphony, but it was
thought at the time that no one would have distinguished
between his musical sensations on visiting
the country and his musical sensations while sitting
beside a river—unless previously told what was coming!

Still, Ole Bull is of a primary order of genius, and
he is not to wait upon precedent. He has come to
our country, an inspired wanderer from a far away
shore, and our greatest scenic feature has called on
him for an expression of its wonders in music. He
may be inspired, however, and we, who listen, still
be disappointed. He may not have felt Niagara as we
did. He may have been subdued where a meaner
spirit would be aroused—as

(Seven o'clock, and time to go.)

(AFTER THE PERFORMANCE.)

We believe that we have heard a transfusion into
music—not of “Niagara,” which the audience seemed
bona-fide to expect, but—of the pulses of the human
heart AT Niagara. We had a prophetic boding of the
result of calling the piece vaguely “Niagara”—the
listener furnished with no “argument,” as a guide
through the wilderness of “treatment” to which the
subject was open. This mistake allowed, however,
it must be said that Ole Bull has, genius-like, refused
to mis-interpret the voice within him—refused to play
the charlatan, and “bring the house down”—as he
might well have done by any kind of “uttermost,” from
the drums and trumpets of the orchestra.

The emotion at Niagara is all but mute. It is a
“small, still voice” that replies within us to the thunder
of waters. The musical mission of the Norwegian
was to represent the insensate element as it was to
him—to a human soul, stirred in its seldom-reached
depths by the call of power. It was the answer to
Niagara that he endeavored to render in music—not
the call! We defer attempting to read further, or
rightly, this musical composition till we have heard
it again. It was received by a crowded audience, in
breathless silence, but with no applause.

Miss Julia Northall's first appearance as a public
singer was very triumphant. If her heart had not
kept beating just under her music-maker, she would
have made much better music, however. When we
tell the lovely debutante, that persons in besieged
fortresses can detect the direction of the enemy's approach
under ground, by placing sanded drums on
the surface, which betray the strokes of the mining
pickaxes by the vibrations of the particles, she will
understand how the beating of her heart may disturb
the timbre of her voice—to say nothing of the disturbance
in the air by the accelerated beating of the
anxious hearts of her admirers! She has great advantages—a
rich voice deep down with an upper
chamber in it (what the musicians call a contralto
sfogato), and a kind of personal beauty susceptible of
great stage embellishments. “Modest assurance”
(with a preponderance of assurance if anything), is her
great lack.

Sanquirico sang admirably—but his black coat
spoiled it for all but the cognoscenti.

We came out of the opera-house amid a shower of
expressions of disappointment, and we beg pardon of
“the town” for remembering what Antigenides of
Athens said to a musical pupil who was once too little
applauded. “The next time you play,” said Antigenides,
“shall be to me and the Muses.”

The two new Fashions, White Cravats and
Ladies' Tarpaulins.—Here and there a country
reader will, perhaps, require to be informed that no
man is stylish, now, “out” in the evening, without a

white cravat. To those who frequent the opera this
will be no news, of course; as no eye could have
failed to track the “milky way,” around the semicircle,
from stage-box to stage-box. The fact thus
recorded, however, we proceed to the diagnosis of the
fashion (and of another fashion, of which we shall
presently speak)—premising only that we are driven
to the discussion of these comparatively serious
themes, by the frivolous character of other news, and
the temporary public surfeit of politics, scandal, and
murder.

The white cravat was adopted two years since, in
London, as the mark of a party—“Young England.”
Our readers know, of course, that for ten years, they
have been worn only by servants in that country, and
that a black coat and white cravat were the unmistakable
uniform of a family butler. The cravat having
been first worn as the distinction of a certain reforming
club, in Cromwell's parliament, however, the
author of Vivian Grey adopted it as the insignium of
the new political party, of which he is the acknowledged
leader; and, as the king of the white cravats, he
has set a fashion for America. The compliment we
pay him is the greater, by the way, that we do not
often copy the tight-legged nation in our wearables.

It was established in Brummell's time that a white
cravat could not be successfully tied, except upon the
critical turn preceding the reaction of a glass of champague
and a cup of green tea. A felicitous dash of
inspired dexterity is the only thing to be trusted, and
failure is melancholy! As to dressiness, a white cravat
is an intensifier—making style more stylish, and the
lack of it more observable; but artistically it is only
becoming to light complexions—by its superior whiteness,
producing an effect of warmth on a fair skin,
but impoverishing the brilliancy of a dark one. As a
sign of the times, the reappearance of the white cravat
is the forerunner of a return to old-fashioned
showiness in evening dress, and, as the wheel comes
round again, we shall revive tights, buckles, and shoes
—expelling the levelling costume of black cravat and
boots, and making it both expensive and troublesome
to look like a gentleman after candlelight. So tilts
the plank in republics—aristocratic luxury going up
as aristocratic politics are going down!

But what shall we say of trains and tarpaulins for
ladies wear! Jack's hat, copied exactly in white satin,
is the rage for a head-dress, now—(worn upon the
side of the head with a ruinous feather)—and a velvet
train is about becoming indispensable to a chaperon!
It will be a bold poor man that will dare to marry a
lady ere long—what with feathers and trains and
pages' wages! We rejoice that we had our fling in
the era of indifferent pocket. Keep the aristocracy
unemployed on politics for another administration or
two, and we shall drive matrimony to the extremities
of society—none but the very rich, or very poor, able
to afford the luxury!

Merry Christmas.—Our paper of this evening—
(Christmas eve)—is to be read by the light of the
“YULE LOG,”—or whatever else represents the bright
centre around which, dear reader! your family does
its Christmas assembling. We shall perhaps amuse
you by suggesting a comparison between the elegant
lamp, which diffuses its light over your apartment,
and the expedient resorted to by your English ancestors
to brighten the hall for their Christmas evening.
“I myself,” says an old historian, “have seen table-cloths,
napkins, and towels, which being taken foul
from the table, have been cast into the fire, and there
they burned before our faces upon the hearth.” This,
of course, was by way of illustrating the greasy habits
of our ancestors at table, and gives an amusing piquan
cy to the injunction of wisdom that we should cherish
the “lights of the past.”

There are two points of freedom in which we envy
the condition of slaves at the south—FREEDOM from
responsibility at all times, and FREEDOM from all manner
of work from Christmas to New Year. “The
negroes” (says a writer on the festivals, games, and
amusements, in the southern states), “enjoy a week's
recreation every winter, including Christmas and New
Year's; during which they prosecute their plays and
sports in a very ludicrous and extravagant manner,
dressing and masking in the most grotesque style, and
having, in fact, a complete carnival.” We confess
this let-up from the pressure of toil is enviable. The
distinction between horse and man, in the latter's requiring
mental as well as bodily rest, should be legislated
upon—all business barred with penalties, except
for the necessaries of life, during the Christmas holydays
and during another week somewhere in June.
We are a monotonous people in this country. The
festivals of the Jews occupied a quarter of the year,
and eighty days were given to festivals among the
ancient Greeks! We do not fairly keep more than
one in New York—New Year's day—the only day,
except Sundays, when newspapers are not issued and
shops are all shut.

We are sorry we can not paragraph America into
more feeling for holydays, but we may perhaps prevent
a gradual desuctude of even keeping Christmas, by
heaping up our regrets when it comes round. We
shall join the procession of visiters to the toy-shops
and confectioners to-night, and we think, by the way,
that these rounds to the gift-venders, might be made
exceedingly agreeable. “Guion,” “Sands,” “Thompson,”
“Tiffany & Young,” “Stuart's Candy
Palace,” “Bonfanti's,” and “the Alhamra,” are
beautiful places for a range of soirees in hat and bonnet,
and we went this round last Christmas eve with
great amusement. Happy children are beautiful
sights, and we can still see bons-bons with their eyes.

Reader! a merry Christmas! and let us repeat
once more to you the old stanza (tho' old Trinity is
no longer what it was when this was written):—

The other side of Broadway.—It is time that
the decline of the era of shopping a foot was fairly announced
as at its fall—an epoch gone over to history.
Washington Hall has been purchased as a property
no longer objectionable from its being the other side
of mud, and is to be speedily converted into the most
magnificent “ladies store” within the limits of silk
and calico. We are credibly assured that this last
assertion is fully borne out by the plans of Mr. Stuart,
the projector. No shop in London or Paris is to
surpass it. But the best part of it remains to be told:
—The building is to have a court for carriages in the
centre, so that shoppers will thunder in at a porte
cochére, like visiters to the grand duke of Tuscany!
There will of course be a spacious door on the street,
for those who can cross Broadway without a carriage
—(poor zealous things!)—but the building is contrived
for those to whom the crowded side of the street
is rather an objection, and who wish their hammer-cloths
to stand out of the spatter of omnibuses while
they shop!! There is a comment on “the times”
in this plan of Mr. Stuart's which we commend to the
notice of some other parish.

Farther down-town, however (156) the shilling side
of Broadway has been embellished by a new store, intended
for all comers and customers, and certainly an
ornament to the town—occupied by Beebe & Costar,
hatters. No more showy and sumptuous saloon
could possibly be contrived than this “hatter's shop;”
and it is very well that they keep one article of ladies'
wear—(riding-hats)—for it is altogether too pretty a
place for a monastery. The specimen hats stand on
rows of marble tables, and the room is lined with mirrors
and white panels—the effect very much that of a
brilliant French café. As to the article of merchandise,
Beebe & Costar have made tributary the “lines
of beauty” to a degree which gives their hats a most
peculiar elegance of shape, and it is worth the while
of those who are nice in their tegmen, to “look in.”

Apropos:—The only god who employed a hatter
was Mercury—why is not that “English clever”
deity, with his winged hat, installed as a hatter's
crest? The propriety of it must have occurred to the
hatters. Possibly we are so mercurial a nation, that
it was thought impolitic—no man wanting any more
mercury in his hat—at least when it is on. We see
that the annual hatters' ball comes off on the 26th.
May we venture to suggest as topics of discussion in
the quadrilles—1st, Mercury's claims to the arms of
the assembly, and, 2d, what peltry was probably used
by the hatter of Olympus, and 3d, whether (as it was
a winged hat) it must not have been made of the only
quadruped that flies fur, the flying squirrel? “Curious
questions, coz!”

France versus England, or the Black Cravat
versus the White.—We have received, in a very
London-club-y handwriting, a warlike reply to the
note we published lately from a French gentleman on
the subject of the white cravat. The two nations
seem to have separated into hostile array on the subject.
Our English correspondent certainly brings
cogent arguments in favor of the white, and indeed
of English costume generally. After asking very
naturally what our French correspondent's phrase,
“perfidious Albion,” had to do with it, and suggesting
that “black cravat” had better “reflect on the late
conduct of the French in the Pacific,” he goes on
with the matter in question:—

“The English fashion for gentlemen's dress is never
to sacrifice comfort to appearance, which the French
fashion invariably does; the clothes of the English
are loosely made, so that every limb of the body is
free. You see nothing in the dress that can be called
effeminate; they appear to eschew everything that
approaches the `Miss Nancy school;' no man with
them is considered well-dressed, however costly his
attire, if he be not manly in his appearance. Now, a
Frenchman's clothes are made to fit so tight, that it
is impossible for him to look at his ease. A Frenchman
dressed looks as if he had just come out of a
band-box; he looks like a pretty doll which you see
in the shop windows in Paris. To hand a lady a
chair, he runs the danger of bursting his coat, or
cracking his waist-band; he can not stoop to pick up
a lady's fan, without danger to his inexpressibles.
The Frenchman dressed is no longer the easy, pliant,
laughing man, that we know him to be when in dishabille—but
he is stiff, unnatural, and effeminate.

“The English fashion abhors display; the French,
on the contrary, invites it. With the Frenchman
dress is a great affair, for he intends to make a sensation.
With the Englishman it is but secondary, for
he does not believe that mere dress can have any influence.
You may form an idea of the sentiments
of both nations from this national character—the
English (and Americans) are proud, but not vain;
the French are very vain, but have little pride.

“Again: we like the Englishman's fondness for
white linen, and in this we can not imitate him too
closely. It is not only in the evening, as with the
Frenchman, that he puts on his fine linen, but at
rising he must have it.—Though he may wear a
shaggy morning coat, his under garments must be
spotless. You may know him when travelling on the
continent, by the unrivalled whiteness of his linen.
The same cleanliness makes the white cravat preferable.
It has its recommendation in being a clean
fashion—for no gentleman can wear it more than
once; whereas, the black satin cravat, which your
correspondent so much extols, is an exceedingly dirty
fashion—for, after dancing, the perspiration settles in
the satin; and with the dust in the room, &c., it becomes
unfit to wear more than twice, whereas the
French wear their cravats until they are worn out.”

The sun “kept Christmas” yesterday, by appearing
“in his best.” We never saw a more joyous, kindly,
holyday quality of sunshine. All who had hearts to
go abroad with, went abroad, and a-Broadway was a
long aisle of beauty in nature's roofless cathedral.
God help all who were not happy yesterday! We
picked up a bit of real-life poetry (by-the-way) in a
very unexpected place yesterday—a confectioner's
shop! The circumstance is at such a distance from
poetry, that the flash comes before the report—a
laugh before the eye is moistened. At Thompson's,
the best confectioner of the city, we saw a large pound-cake,
with a figure of a nun standing on it, dressed in
white, and we were told that a cake had just gone to
the sisters of the Barclay-street convent, with this little
figure in mourning instead of white—sent by a
young catholic lady who had just lost her mother.
As a conveyance of a thought, intended to be entirely
between the mourner and the sympathising sisters,
we think this was very beautiful. Perhaps we
spoil it by giving the coarse-minded a chance to ridicule
it.

We wish to introduce to the reader the word tonality.
Let us show its availableness at once by using
it to express the secret of Pico's overwhelming effect
upon the audience on Saturday evening. As musical
people know, melody is the natural “concord of sweet
sounds,” and harmony may be tolerably defined as the
artificial creation of surprises to vary melody. Malibran
saw, for instance, that one of her rustic audiences
could feel melody, but was incapable of appreciating
harmony, when they tumultuously encored her in
“Home, Sweet Home,” and let her “Di tanti palpiti”
go by without applause! It takes more than
one hearing, for persons not learned in music, to appreciate
the hormony of an opera, though if there be
in it an air of simple melody, a child will listen to
it, for the first time, with delight. But there are operas,
much cried up, where the melody and harmony
are not in TONE; and though people may be made to
like them against nature (as they like olives), the majority
of the audience will feel incredulous as to its
being “good music.” (We were two or three years
opera-going before these unwritten distinctions got
through our dura mater, dear reader; and if you are
not in a hurry, perhaps you will pay us the compliment
of reading them over again, while we mend our
pen for a new paragraph.)

Pico sang a part in the opera of Saturday night,
which, in our opinion, owed its electric power to three
tonalities: tone No. 1, between the harmony and melody
of the music—tone No. 2, between the music

and her own impression on the public as a woman—
and tone No. 3, between the opera and the mood of
the public for that evening.

Tone No. 1 is already explained. Tone No. 3 was,
perhaps, a combination of pleasurable accidents—
both the donnas in one piece, the house crammed
with fashion, and graced with more beauty than usual,
and (last, not least) the change in the weather. A sudden
south wind in December, makes even fashion affectionate,
and, with such influences in the air, music
that is “the food of love,” may “play on”—with
entire confidence as to its reception. Of tone No. 2
(the part in Donizetti's opera) we wish to speak more
at large, but we can not trust ourself afloat with it in
a paragraph already under headway.

Donizetti is commonly rated as a trite and not very
vigorous composer. As a musical convoy, he never
drops the slowest sailor below the horizon. But, that
he lets his heart steer the music whenever he can persuade
science to give up the helm, everybody must
have felt who has embarked a thought in one of his
operas. The music written down for Orsini (Pico's
part) expresses the character that Shakspere's words
give to Mercutio—the prince of thoughtless good
fellows, careless, loveable, and amusing. Between
this and Pico's personal qualities (as made legible
across the footlights), there is a tonality the town has
felt—a joyous recognition, by the audience, of a complete
correspondence between the good-fellow music
she sings and the good fellow nature has made her.
There is a class of such women—some of them the
most captivating of their sex, and every one of them
the acknowledged “best creature in the world” of the
circle she lives in. Here and there a person will understand
better what we mean if we mention that
Pico sat in the proscenium-box on the night of Ole
Bull's concert, and, with a full house looking at her
with eager curiosity, sat and munched her under-lip
most unbecomingly, in perfect unconsciousness of
any need of forbearing to do in public what she would
have done if she were alone! We must say we like
women that forget themselves!

We heard twenty judicious persons comment on
the opera of Saturday, and with but one expression
of never, in any country, having enjoyed opera more.
The universal tonality, to which we have tried to play
the interpreter, is partly a matter of coincidence, and
may not happen again; but we assure the two donnas
and our friend Signor Sacchi, that with the remembrance
of it, and with them both in the glorious opera
of Semiramide, next week, they will want a larger
house than Palmo's.

And, by-the-way, this amiable “Quintius Curtius”
of the opera, who has procured us the luxury of a
temple of music by jumping into the gulf with his
$47,000—excellent Signor Palmo—claims of the public
a slight return; no more than that they should acknowledge
the fact of his disaster! It has been doubted
that he has lost money, and some of the world's
cruelty has been dealt out to him in the shape of a
sneer at his sincerity. We copy (literally) the explanation
sent us on the subject, and bespeak for him
present public regard, and some future more tangible
demonstration:—

“Being attracted by a statement made in the Mirror
in reference to the Italian company at Palmo's
opera-house, showing the receipts and disbursements
for twelve nights, leaving but a small amount to be
divided by the company, after having as good and better
houses than when under the auspices of Signor
Palmo, whose honesty has been imputed to have made
money, and made the public and his creditors believe
the contrary, now the mystery is solved, and the public
should be satisfied of Signor Palmo's integrity,
who is ready to show by bills paid, and his books, that
he has lost $47,000 the last four years.”