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 were surprised when
any one read silently, and sought secretly the reason of it. In a
loud vo