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 depended 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 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 antiquity, who knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance 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 dilettanti 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 elevation.  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 discourse—­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, rushes, 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 seldom 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 hitherto been the best German book.  Compared with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is merely “literature”—­something which has not grown in Germany, and therefore has not taken and does not take root in German hearts, as the Bible has done.

248.  There are two kinds of geniuses:  one which above all engenders and seeks to engender, and another which willingly lets itself be fructified and brings forth.  And similarly, among the gifted nations, there are those on whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy has devolved, and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting—­the Greeks, for instance, were a nation of this kind, and so are the French; and others which have to fructify and become the cause of new modes of life—­like the Jews, the Romans, and, in all modesty be it asked:  like the Germans?—­ nations tortured and