Page 192 - beyond-good-and-evil

sense, a period is above all a physiological whole, inasmuch
as it is comprised in one breath. Such periods as occur in
Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice,
and all in one breath, were pleasures to the men of ANTIQ-
UITY, who knew by their own schooling how to appreciate
the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the de-
liverance of such a period;—WE have really no right to the
BIG period, we modern men, who are short of breath in
every sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilet-
tanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently
critics—they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch;
in the same manner as in the last century, when all Italian
ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of
song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its eleva-
tion. In Germany, however (until quite recently when a kind
of platform eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough
to flutter its young wings), there was properly speaking only
one kind of public and APPROXIMATELY artistical dis-
course—that delivered from the pulpit. The preacher was
the only one in Germany who knew the weight of a syllable
or a word, in what manner a sentence strikes, springs, rush-
es, flows, and comes to a close; he alone had a conscience in
his ears, often enough a bad conscience: for reasons are not
lacking why proficiency in oratory should be especially sel-
dom attained by a German, or almost always too late. The
masterpiece of German prose is therefore with good reason
the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the BIBLE has hith-
erto been the best German book. Compared with Luther’s
Bible, almost everything else is merely ‘literature’—some-

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