[36] A magister promotion corresponds approximately to our university commencements. It is the ceremony of bestowing the degree of master of arts.
This was certainly an attractive doctrine, and it did not fail to command public approval. But it suffers from exactly the same limitation as Tegnér's gospel of joy. It is only relatively (I might almost say temperamentally) true; and the opposite might be maintained with equal force, and in fact was so maintained by Atterbom, who declared (in the "Poetical Calendar for 1821") that there can be no such a conception as light without darkness. Darkness, he says, is the condition of all color and form. You distinguish the light and all things in it only by the contrasting effect of shadow--all of which, I fancy, Tegnér would not have denied. More to the point would have been the query whether in poetry darkness and indistinctness are synonymous terms. It is only the most commonplace truths which can be made intelligible to all. Much of the best and highest thinking of humanity lies above the plane of the ordinary untrained intellect. What is light to me may be twilight or darkness to you. What to you is clear as the daylight, may to me be as densely impenetrable as the Cimmerian night. Christ himself recognized this fact when he said to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now."
For all that, Tegnér's doctrine was in its effect wholesome. It discouraged the writers of the Romantic School, who under the guise of profundity gave publicity to much immature and confused thinking. He was no doubt right in saying that "a poetry which commences with whooping-cough is likely to end in consumption." His frequently repeated maxim, that poetry is nothing but the health of life, "occasioned by an abounding intellectual vigor, a joyous leap over the barriers of everyday life," applied, however, to his own poetry only so long as his vigor was unimpaired. His terrible poem "Hypochondria" (_Mjeltsjukan_) is to me no less poetical because it is not "a petrified drop of heavenly light," and mocks all the cheerful theories of its author's prime.
Tegnér had yet a few years in which to rejoice in this "health of life" in which he found the inspiration for his song; and these last years were the most fruitful in his entire career. He was about forty years of age when, in 1820, he began to compose the first cantos of "Frithjof's Saga." He was living in modest comfort, happy in his marital relation, and surrounded by a family of children to whom he was a most affectionate father. He could romp and play with his curly-headed boys and girls without any loss of dignity; and they loved nothing better than to invade his study. Next to them in his regard was a black-nosed pug, named Atis, who invariably accompanied him to his lectures and remained sitting at his feet listening with intelligent gravity to his explanations of the Greek poets. If by chance his master, in his zeal for his own poetry, forgot the lecture-hour, Atis would respectfully pull him by the tails of his coat. No man at the University of Lund was more generally beloved than Tegnér, and all honors which the University could bestow had been offered to him. The office of Rector Magnificus he had, however, persisted in declining.