10 Beyond Good and Evil
and requirements, and to listen to so much art and inten-
tion in language? After all, one just ‘has no ear for it”; and
so the most marked contrasts of style are not heard, and the
most delicate artistry is as it were SQUANDERED on the
deaf.—These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsi-
ly and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose- writing
have been confounded: one, whose words drop down hesi-
tatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave—he
counts on their dull sound and echo; and another who ma-
nipulates his language like a flexible sword, and from his
arm down into his toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quiv-
ering, over-sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.
- How little the German style has to do with harmo-
ny and with the ear, is shown by the fact that precisely
our good musicians themselves write badly. The German
does not read aloud, he does not read for the ear, but only
with his eyes; he has put his ears away in the drawer for
the time. In antiquity when a man read— which was sel-
dom enough—he read something to himself, and in a loud
voice; they were surprised when any one read silently, and
sought secretly the reason of it. In a loud voice: that is to
say, with all the swellings, inflections, and variations of
key and changes of TEMPO, in which the ancient PUBLIC
world took delight. The laws of the written style were then
the same as those of the spoken style; and these laws de-
pended partly on the surprising development and refined
requirements of the ear and larynx; partly on the strength,
endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. In the ancient