Enemy of the People_. Is very doubtful whether, without the discipline
which forced him to put on the stage, at Bergen and in Christiania,
plays evidently unsympathetic to his own taste, which obliged him to do
his best for the popular reception of those plays, and which forced him
minutely to analyze their effects, he would ever have been the world-
moving dramatist which, as all sane critics must admit, he at length
became.

He made some mistakes at first; how could he fail to do so? It was the
recognition of these blunders, and perhaps the rough censure of them the
local press, which induced the Bergen theatre to scrape a few dollars
together and send him, in charge of some of the leading actors and
actresses, to Copenhagen and Dresden for instruction. To go from Bergen
to Copenhagen was like travelling from Abdera to Athens, and to find a
species of Sophocles in J. A. Heiberg, who had since 1849 been sole
manager of the Royal Theatre. Here the drama of the world, all the
salutary names, all the fine traditions, burst upon the pilgrims from
the North. Heiberg, the gracious and many-sided, was the centre of light
in those days; no one knew the stage as he knew no one interpreted it
with such splendid intelligence, and he received the crude Norwegian
"dramatist-manager" with the utmost elegance of cordiality. Among the
teachers of Ibsen, Heiberg ranks as the foremost. We may farther and say
that he was the last. When Ibsen had learned the lesson of Heiberg, only
nature and his own genius had anything more to teach him. [See Note
below] In August, 1852, rich with the spoils of time, but otherwise poor
indeed, Ibsen made his way back to his duties in Bergen.

[Note: Perhaps no author, during the whole of his career, more deeply
impressed Ibsen with reverence and affection than Johan Ludvig Heiberg
did. When the great Danish poet died (at Bonderup, August 25, 1860),