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He has to put brown paper in his boots because he can't afford to have them resoled. No, it's the Barabbas in the rectory-house, that buys his stocks and shares, and starves the service." This tirade fell lightly on the stranger's ears. He looked as if his thoughts were a thousand miles away, and the organist broke off: "Do you play the organ? Do you understand an organ?" he asked quickly. "Alas!
Johann Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III., portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in an allemande. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano.
But after heavy rains the great black letters stared perversely through their veil, and the organist made small jokes about it being a difficult thing to thwart the Hand of God. Silly and indecorous, Miss Joliffe termed such witticisms, and had Bellevue House painted in gold upon the fanlight over the door.
The patron soon tired of Connaught, and carried off his protege to London, where he placed him under Dr. Worgan, the famous blind organist of Westminster Abbey. At home, young MacOwen's duties were to keep his employer's accounts, to carve at table, and to sing Irish melodies to his guests.
But he got there all right when the square dance was over, and José flourished his fiddle and sung out for the Señores and Señoritas to take partners for a valsa, and the Hen brought up Kerosene to foot it with him telling him she was the organist who was going to play the melodeon when they got it, and he'd find her a nice partner as she was about the best dancer they had.
She had recovered her composure by the time the benediction was pronounced and the organ was yielding an unusually lively postlude to whose strains she and George Frothingham descended the stairs together. "The old chap is almost waltzing us out to-day," that gentleman remarked, referring to the organist. "Winifred, you outdid yourself to-day on that lovely thing." Winifred smiled faintly.
But that is not all: behind him came the semblance of a human being in whose crooked legs and bushy tangled hair I recognized by old tri-monthly providence, my banker, my money-bringer, in a word my worthy friend, the mysterious dwarf. I did not escape, myself, his vigilant eye, and I saw him point me out to the organist with an eager gesture.
The organist immediately preceding the present one used to play for nothing; get one or two collections annually for the choir; and make up out of his own pocket any financial deficiency there might be.
Blow may have taught Purcell something of the older technique; that of Lulli and the Italians he must have learnt from Humphries, for Dr. Blow knew next to nothing about it. Dr. Blow was born in 1648, and was one year younger than Humphries, and ten older than Purcell. In 1669 he became organist of Westminster Abbey.
There is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but Browning could not merely talk art with artists he could talk shop with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist.
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