.."
[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 Tegner'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, Tegner 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.
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