The Wheat

The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.

Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees, I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky; how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern landscape, the antique, passionate, Biblical beauty of the South!

NOTES TO THE ABOVE

Rôle. The italics and accent may be due to consciousness of roll. The French word will never make itself comfortable in English if it is homophonous with roll.

Timbre. This word is in a peculiar condition. In the French it has very various significations, but has come to be adopted in music and acoustics to connote the quality of a musical sound independent of its pitch and loudness, a quality derived from the harmonics which the fundamental note intensifies, and that depends on the special form of the instrument. The article Clang in the Oxford Dictionary quotes Professor Tyndall regretting that we have no word for this meaning, and suggesting that we should imitate the awkward German klang-farbe. We have no word unless we forcibly deprive clangour of its noisy associations. We generally use timbre in italics and pronounce it as French; and since the word is used only by musicians this does not cause much inconvenience to them, but it is because of its being an unenglish word that it is confined to specialists: and truly if it were an English word the quality which it denotes would be spoken of more frequently, and perhaps be even more differentiated and recognized, though it is well known to every child. Now how should this word be Englished? Is the spelling or the pronunciation to stand? The English pronunciation of the letters of timbre is forbidden by its homophone—a French girl collecting postage-stamps in England explained that she collected timberposts—, whereas our English form of the French sound of the word would be approximately tamber; and this would be not only a good English-sounding word like amber and clamber, but would be like our tambour, which is tympanum, which again IS timbre. So that if our professors and doctors of music were brave, they would speak and write tamber, which would be not only English but perfectly correct etymologically.