Of Pleasant Noises

by D. B. Wyndham Lewis

ABOUT THE END of the fourteenth century there lived in the grassy Norman valley called the Vaux de Vire, on the edge of the Cotentin, a fulling-miller named Olivier Basselin, whose nose was ruddier than the cherry, whose laugh could be heard on a clear day as far away as St. Lo, and who wrote some of the best drinking-songs in the world; of which I have a large number in a book.

This roaring miller was the chief of a little band, cluster, or gaggle of country poets, nearly all peasants; for if the Norman, according to Octave Mirabeau and Maupassant, is hard, avaricious, gluttonous, and rooted to his soil (he also gave us government and reopened for us islanders a window on the rest of Europe, greatly to the annoyance of a supercilious gentleman in a bowler hat with whom I had an argument the other day), he could once both make up and sing good songs. Now among the songs of Olivier Basselin there is one which he made one day on passing the village cooper’s and hearing him hammering at a cask. It begins:

O tintamarre plaisant
Et doulcement resonant
Des tonneaulx que l'on relie!

“O the delicious sweetly-resounding racket of wine-casks being coopered!” And he continues: “Faith, a sign that we shall be drinking soon! By Gosh, the lovely clamour! It has saved me from dying of melancholy this very day!”

Now Heaven and my Patron forbid that I should fall into the disgraceful error of praising a wine-bibber, and a medieval at that! I dare say the same quick gush of joy informs a totally abstaining and modern breast on passing a cocoa factory and hearing the bean-polishers singing at their work; and I dare say Mr. Eustace Miles feels the same on hearing the rattle of the nuts pouring into the Mock-Steak machine. O tintamarre plaisant! And this brings me to my point, namely, that there are thousands of noises so pleasant and gladsome, whether of themselves or through their associations, that they make the heart fly and twitter like a bird. Did not the clink of bottles please the infant Gargantua so that “at the sound of Pintes and Flaggons he would on a sudden fall into an Extasie, as if he had been tasted of the Joyes of Paradise”? Hey?

Another bibber, I fear. But not (please Heaven) medieval. The war horse in Holy Writ loved the sound of the trumpet, and would say, Ha! Trumpets are always a pleasant noise (provided they are not sounding you to rise early and combat) : and their brazen uproar is particularly heartening at a Coronation, or in the forest scene in “Boris Godounov,” or even in that massy Requiem of Berlioz—though in this they put one in mind of Death: another medieval superstition.

The squeals of a bumptious critic threatened with the State punishment called peine forte et dure*, now alas! abolished, I would walk a long way to hear; at the same time lightly criticising the key and timbre of his yells.

The noise made by nightingales in the full moon has been commented on at enormous length by a mort of poets.

How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
    Again—thou hearest!
        Eternal Passion!
        Eternal Pain!

That was written by an Inspector of Schools under the Government of Queen Victoria. The noise of water boiling in a kettle, the noise of a great wood thrashed by a storm, the noise of bees bumbling in a summer afternoon, of horses galloping, of a fiddle playing Couperin, of ducks quacking on green English ponds, of little waves guggling round a boat’s bows, of strong masterful men utterly discomfited, of bacon sputtering in a pan in the cool of morning, of knaves foaming against Providence, of bells heard at sea, of adulterators of honest liquor unmasked and objurgating, of—

Shall I tell you, by the way, what the old French poet said in a Ballade about this last kind of scoundrel? He said: “May the swabs have their giblets tickled with a Turkish arrow and a sharp sword; may Greek fire scorch their thatch and a great tempest scatter their brains; may their carrion bodies hang from a high gibbet, and may they die very swiftly in agony from the gout; I demand and request also that they be prodded with red-hot iron bars and flayed alive by ten hangmen, boiled in oil in the morning, and torn apart by four ramping great horses—the taverners who hocus our good wine.” I call that a Wish. There are two more stanzas like that.

—of girls laughing on an April day, of the crackling and whispering of a beech-log fire in February, of a hunting-horn heard in the green depths of the forest (though one poet I know esteems this a melancholy noise), of Andalusian voices lisping at nightfall, of drums throbbing far off to the tramp of infantry, of groaning farm-wagons heavy with harvest, of stockbrokers howling after a market crash, of ice tinkling in a jug under the Dog-Star, of grasshoppers chirping in August hayfields, of high tides swishing regularly on shingle beaches, of distant scythes being honed, of anchor-chains rattling down in haven: all these are lovely and pleasant noises, enlarging and uplifting human hearts.

I would add, also, the bawling of Mr. ******, a Leading Thinker, when menaced with punishment by the State for endeavouring to befuddle and incornifistigropilibustulate honest men’s minds. I would not have him dealt with in the stern old way, that is by

1. The Question Ordinary
2. The Boot, the favourite pastime of James the First, whom the Scots gave us: a great booby and dribbler, and half-mad even by Northern standards.
3. The punishment awarded Gossouin de Louet, a citizen of Paris, in the year 1435, for plotting to throw the English out of Paris; he was par gehine et question tresdurement traveillié de son corps**, which is something most uncomfortable, but was pardoned by Bedford, acting for Henry VI. I have just been reading his case.

These were punishments for men. I would have the Leading Thinker merely slapped and exposed to the derision of all true citizens. His screams, I think, would be in the MixoLydian Mode, on the dominant F sharp: a very pleasing noise.

There is one noise, a Master Noise, which to some may be hackneyed, to others harsh, to others meaningless, to others dull, to others tuneless, but to me exquisite, soothing, rare, and never-too-often-to-be-repeated: the noise (forgive my quaint frenzy) of great fat cheques being ripped violently from their moorings and presented unawares to poor men. Match me (as the Don sang, but referring to a rose-red city of the East)—

Match me such marvel, whether East or West,
So full of blooming ecstasy and zest.

I have done.

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* legal French for hard and forceful punishment, that is, torture -ed.

** “by judicial torture and questioning very harshly afflicted in his body” -ed.

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