Calvin on the Barrel-Organ
AFTERTHOUGHT
By JOHN WELLS
It was a very peaceful morning, with the poplars standing in the still air and a faint mist over the meadows, and the booming of the church bell in the village seemed to carry with almost supernatural clarity. Inside there was a high wooden pulpit beneath the white-painted chancel arch, and the pastor stood rather dramatic- ally in black under a circular yellow lamp set in the sounding-board and the singing of the congregation in unison as they sat in the white church was powerful and moving. The sermon, however, of which I was able to absorb only the outline, dealt with the punishment of the Elect in the first chapter of Amos. This even seemed to confuse the rest of the congregation, and went on for thirty-two minutes. After three collections and an interminable extempore prayer, it occurred to me that a better place to muse on the mysteries of predestination and election might be the musical box museum in Utrecht.
On my last visit, two years before, the museum had been full of Dutch businessmen. The little figures had moved on the musical boxes, the brick-floored room had echoed to jangling pianolas and trumpeting fairground organs, but the businessmen had remained humourless and silent, holding their large grey hats in front of them and showing only occasionally an interest in some historical detail. I remember thinking at the time that they must be Calvinists, finding nothing comic in painted figurines jerking awkwardly round to bring a hammer down on a bell: for them the figurines were merely illus- trating the inevitable necessity of a life in which the chosen inevitably surrender to irre- sistible grace and are eventually inevitably saved. Admittedly the little figurines were not conscious of being chosen, of being subjected to irresistible grace (whoever she may be) or of ringing the bell in the end, and were therefore unable to adopt any religious or moral attitude to their fate: but on the face of it there didn't seem much point in the convinced Calvinist doing so either. I had anyway to keep my chuckles at the antics of the little manikins en- tirely to myself.
Last Sunday afternoon, however, the religious atmosphere seemed more liberal. There was a young Dutch couple with a beaming baby son in bright red trousers, and various other free- thinkers who seemed in the mood for a good laugh. The tour began quietly, with an early musical box. The guide wound it up, the brass roller fitted with patterns of black pin-points turned slowly against the flat steel comb and produced a hesitant tinkling tune. The baby gurgled and we moved on. We were shown more complex mechanisms in which brightly enam- elled metal butterflies struck against silver bells, and a white clown who played a mandolin.
We next came to the most beautiful musical box of all. The guide lifted out a tiny harmonica which he then slotted back into the box, and wound it up. The soft, tired piping of the waltz would have been beautiful enough, but under the glass bell above it little brown birds began to move among the painted leaves, cheeping softly, continuing even for a moment or two when the musical box had slowed on its last inevitable phrase and had switched itself off. I grasped vainly after some large and profound insight about the beauty of life being almost mechan- ically dependent on the single inevitability of death, and then was mercifully interrupted by the baby in the red trousers, clapping its hands together and dribbling with delight at the next exhibit.
This was an eighteenth-century model with three rather threadbare monkeys dressed in wigs, silk stockings and buckled shoes. One was play- ing the violin, opening and closing its mouth to reveal dry grey teeth, the second was playing a cello, turning its eyeless head to a time in- dependent of the music, and the third was a conjuror in a pointed hat, lifting two cones from a table, beneath which dice appeared and dis- appeared. I was on the point of developing an argument to counter this cynical dismissal of chance when the guide turned on a fluting cuckoo clock from Germany, with little wooden men performing a rattling clog-dance. He then disappeared behind an enormous glass case full of organ pipes and drums and trumpets, and turned on the mammoth German Orchestrion. Great blasts of air were forced out of the bel- lows, the brass trumpeted, the drums banged and rattled. Everyone this time appeared to be laughing. Almost immediately a French Orches- trion with glass-bead shades on electric lights which turned on and off began to play a Parisian song called 'Elle a perdu son pantalon.'
Among the pandemonium the suave museum director took me on one side and led me behind the fairground organ to an iron wheel with a wooden handle. It was extremely heavy to turn, and the breathy organ notes, twiddles and thumping drums were deafening. Occasionally heads appeared round the side of the casing, laughing and applauding. Looking at the pile of perforated card which was being drawn in- evitably through the dusty bellows of the organ, determining its prearranged performance, I came to the final theological conclusion that it would be a rotten old life for a Calvinist God, having to set up all this complicated machinery, slaving away behind the scenes to keep the whole farci- cal apparatus working and the little wooden Calvinists moving up and down and hitting their silver bells, if there was nobody else there to laugh at it.
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