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Just how little German style concerns itself with sound and with the ear is demonstrated in the fact that even our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but merely with his eyes. In the process he has put his ears away in a drawer. In antiquity a man read, when he read - and that happened rarely enough - to himself aloud and in a loud voice. People were amazed if someone read quietly, and they secretly asked themselves why. With a loud voice - that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, changes in tone, and shifts in tempo which the ancient public world enjoyed. At that time the principles of writing style were the same as those for the speaking style, and these principles depended in part on the astonishing development and the sophisticated needs of the ear and larynx and in part on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. A syntactic period is, as the ancients understood it, above all a physiological totality, insofar as it is held together by a single breath. Such periods, as they manifest themselves in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling up twice and sinking down twice, all within the single breath - that's what ancient men enjoyed.¹⁰ From their own schooling they knew how to value the virtue in such periods - how rare and difficult it was to deliver them. We really have no right to the great syntactical period, we moderns, we short-winded people in every sense! These ancient people were, in fact, themselves collectively dilettantes in public speaking - and as a result connoisseurs and thus critics. Hence, they drove their speakers to the utmost limits. In a similar way in the last century, once all Italian men and women understood how to sing, among them virtuoso singing (and with that the art of melody as well) reached its high point. But in Germany (right up until very recent times, when a sort of platform eloquence started flapping its young wings timidly and crudely enough) there was really only one form of public speaking which came close to being artistic: what came from the pulpit. In Germany only the preacher understood what a syllable or what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, falls, runs, and ends; only he had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience. For there is no shortage of reasons why it's precisely the German who rarely, and almost always too late, achieves a proficiency in speaking. It is appropriate therefore that the masterwork of German prose is the masterwork of its greatest preacher: up to this point, the Bible has been the best German book. In comparison with Luther's Bible, almost everything else is mere "literature" - something that did not grow in Germany and hence also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts, as the Bible has.