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I was ridiculed, or if people will, I was chastised. Hertz's book went through all Denmark; people spoke of nothing but him. It made it still more piquant that the author of the work could not be discovered. People were enraptured, and justly. Heiberg, in his "Flying Post," defended a few aesthetical insignificants, but not me. I felt the wound of the sharp knife deeply.
Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S. Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed. Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of importance.
The evening after the consecration of the flags, there was a special performance at the Royal Theatre for the members of the Meeting, at which Heiberg, radiant as she always was, and saluted with well-merited enthusiasm, played Sophie in the vaudeville "No," with a rosette of the Scandinavian colours at her waist.
The poets, who, I believe, according to the arrangement of Heiberg, had been invited, stood by their boat; Oehlenschl ger and Heiberg alone had not arrived. And now guns were fired from the ship, which came to anchor, and it was to be feared that Thorwaldsen might land before we had gone out to meet him. The wind bore the voice of singing over to us: the festive reception had already begun.
Heiberg, herself the wittiest of talkers, said that to sit beside Ibsen was to peer into a gold-mine and not catch a glitter from the hidden treasure. But his dumbness was not so bitterly ironical as it was popularly supposed to be. It came largely from a very strange passivity which made definite action unwelcome to him.
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.
The influence of Heiberg and of Hertz, presently to be so potent, had evidently not yet begun. But it is important to perceive that already Norway, and Norwegian taste and opinion, were nothing to him in his selection of themes and forms. It is not to be supposed that the taste for dramatic performances did not exist in Norway, because no Norwegian plays were written.
Some days afterwards, and early in the morning, I went to call upon him, and found him as a friend who had wondered at not having seen me earlier. In honor of Thorwaldsen a musical-poetic academy was established, and the poets, who were invited to do so by Heiberg, wrote and read each one a poem in praise of him who had returned home.
"The author is anonymous, and a clever man." "Good Heavens! you are not the author, Mr. Thostrup?" cried Julle, and looked at him with a penetrating gaze. "You can manage such things so secretly! You think so highly of Heiberg: I remember well all the beautiful things you said of his 'Walter the Potter' and his 'Psyche." Otto assured her that he could not confess to this honor.
I had been charmed as much only by Michael Wiehe and Johanne Luise Heiberg in my salad days when they played together in Hertz's Ninon. But my artistic enjoyment went deeper here, for the character portrayal was very much more true to life.
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