The poet appeared to be almost overwhelmed with
emotion and pleasure; at length, with a gesture which was quite
pathetic, smiling through his tears, he seemed to beg his friends to
spare him, and the plaudits slowly ceased. _An Enemy of the People_ was
then admirably performed. At the close of every act Ibsen was called to
the front of his box, and when the performance was over, and the actors
had been thanked, the audience turned to him again with a sort of
affectionate ferocity. Ibsen was found to have stolen from his box, but
he was waylaid and forcibly carried back to it. On his reappearance, the
whole theatre rose in a roar of welcome, and it was with difficulty that
the aged poet, now painfully exhausted from the strain of an evening of
such prolonged excitement, could persuade the public to allow him to
withdraw. At length he left the theatre, walking slowly, bowing and
smiling, down a lane cleared for him, far into the street, through the
dense crowd of his admirers. This astonishing night, September 2, 1899,
was the climax of Ibsen's career.
During all this time Ibsen was secretly at work on another drama, which
he intended as the epilogue to his earlier dramatic work, or at least to
all that he had written since _The Pillars of Society_.
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