is
business, the tyro to whom the elements of his occupation are unknown.
We have seen that when he wrote _Catilina_ he had neither sat through
nor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. The
pieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation with
Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschlaeger and (if we may guess
what _Norma_ was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one of
the most far-sighted men of his time, must have perceived the germs
of theatrical genius in him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed his
appointment more to what this wise patron felt in his future than what
Ole Bull or any one else could possibly point to as yet accomplished.
Unquestionably, a rude theatrical penetration could already he divined
in his talk about the stage, vague and empirical as that must have been.

At all events, to Bergen he went, as a sort of literary manager, as a
Claretie or Antoine, to compare a small thing with great ones, and the
fact was of inestimable value. It may even be held, without fear of
paradox, that this was the turning-point of Ibsen's life, that this
blind step in the dark, taken in the magnificent freedom of youth, was
what made him what he became. No Bergen in 1851, we may say, and no
_Doll's House_ or _Hedda Gabler_ ultimately to follow. For what it did
was to force this stubborn genius, which might so easily have slipped
into sinister and abnormal paths, and have missed the real humanity of
the stage, to take the tastes of the vulgar into due consideration and
to acquaint himself with the necessary laws of play-composition.

Ibsen may seem to have little relation with the drama of the world, but
in reality he is linked with it at every step. There is something of
Shakespeare in _John Gabriel Borkman_, something Moliere in _Ghosts_,
something of Goethe in _Peer Gynt_. We may go further and say, though
it would have made Ibsen wince, that there is something of Scribe in _An
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