of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity—­doubly dangerous among Germans—­for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and Noli me tangere—­this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair.

246.  What a torture are books written in German to a reader who has a third ear!  How indignantly he stands beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without dance, which Germans call a “book”!  And even the German who reads books!  How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads!  How many Germans know, and consider it obligatory to know, that there is art in every good sentence—­art which must be divined, if the sentence is to be understood!  If there is a misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood!  That one must not be doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one should divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement—­who among book-reading Germans is complaisant enough to recognize such duties and requirements, and to listen to so much art and intention 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 clumsily and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose-writing have been confounded:  one, whose words drop down hesitatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave—­he counts on their dull sound and echo; and another who manipulates his language like a flexible sword, and from his arm down into his toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.

247.  How little the German style has to do with harmony 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 seldom enough—­he read something to himself, and in a loud voice; they