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, Tegner'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.
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