DELUSION & DREAM

AN INTERPRETATION IN THE LIGHT

OF PSYCHOANALYSIS OF GRADIVA,
A NOVEL, BY WILHELM JENSEN,
WHICH IS HERE TRANSLATED

BY
DR. SIGMUND FREUD
Author of “The Interpretation of Dreams,” etc.

TRANSLATED BY
HELEN M. DOWNEY, M.A.

INTRODUCTION BY
DR. G. STANLEY HALL
President of Clark University

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1922

5
PREFACE
To Dr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark
University, who first called to my attention
the
charm of Gradiva, by Wilhelm Jensen, and
suggested the possibility of the translation and
publication combined with the translation of
Freud’s commentary, I am deeply grateful for his
kindly interest and effort in connection with the
publication of the book, and his assistance with
the technical terms of psychopathology.
In this connection I am also indebted to Dr.
Smith Ely Jelliffe, who gave many helpful
suggestions
as a result of his thorough reading of
the manuscript of the commentary.
I wish also to express my profound appreciation
to my friend, Miss M. Evelyn Fitzsimmons,
for
her generous help with the original manuscript
and other valuable comments offered while
she
was reading the entire proof.
HELEN M. DOWNEY.
Worcester, Mass.
 11
PART I

GRADIVA
A POMPEIIAN FANCY
BY

WILHELM JENSEN

13
GRADIVA
On a visit to one of the great antique collections
of Rome, Norbert Hanold had discovered
a
bas-relief which was exceptionally attractive to
him, so he was much pleased, after his return to
Germany, to be able to get a splendid plaster-cast
of it. This had now been hanging for some
years
on one of the walls of his work-room, all the other
walls of which were lined with
bookcases. Here
it had the advantage of a position with the right
light exposure, on a wall
visited, though but briefly,
by the evening sun. About one-third life-size, the
bas-relief
represented a complete female figure in
the act of walking; she was still young, but no
longer in
childhood and, on the other hand,
apparently not a woman, but a Roman virgin
about in her
twentieth year. In no way did she
remind one of the numerous extant bas-reliefs of
a Venus, a
Diana, or other Olympian goddess, and
equally little of a Psyche or nymph. In her was
embodied something humanly commonplace—not
in a bad sense—to a degree a sense of
present time,
as if the artist, instead of making a pencil sketch
of her on a sheet of paper, as is
done in our day,
had fixed her in a clay model quickly, from life,
as she passed on the street, a
14
tall, slight figure,
whose soft, wavy hair a folded kerchief almost
completely bound; her rather
slender face was
not at all dazzling; and the desire to produce such
effect was obviously equally
foreign to her; in
the delicately formed features was expressed a
nonchalant equanimity in
regard to what was
occurring about her; her eye, which gazed calmly
ahead, bespoke absolutely
unimpaired powers of
vision and thoughts quietly withdrawn. So the
young woman was
fascinating, not at all because
of plastic beauty of form, but because she possessed
something
rare in antique sculpture, a
realistic, simple, maidenly grace which gave the
impression of
imparting life to the relief. This was
effected chiefly by the movement represented in
the
picture. With her head bent forward a little,
she held slightly raised in her left hand, so that
her
sandalled feet became visible, her garment
which fell in exceedingly voluminous folds from
her throat to her ankles. The left foot had advanced,
and the right, about to follow, touched
the
ground only lightly with the tips of the toes,
while the sole and heel were raised almost
vertically. This movement produced a double
impression of exceptional agility and of confident
composure, and the flight-like poise, combined
with a firm step, lent her the peculiar grace.
Where had she walked thus and whither was
she going? Doctor Norbert Hanold, docent of
archæology, really found in the relief nothing
noteworthy for his science. It was not a plastic
production of great art of the antique times, but
was essentially a Roman genre production, and
15
he
could not explain what quality in it had aroused
his attention; he knew only that he had been

attracted by something and this effect of the first

view had remained unchanged since then. In
order to bestow a name upon the piece of sculpture,
he had called it to himself Gradiva, “the
girl
splendid in walking.” That was an epithet applied
by the ancient poets solely to Mars
Gradivus, the
war-god going out to battle, yet to Norbert it seemed
the most appropriate
designation for the bearing
and movement of the young girl, or, according to
the expression of
our day, of the young lady, for
obviously she did not belong to a lower class but
was the
daughter of a nobleman, or at any rate
was of honourable family. Perhaps—her appearance
brought the idea to his mind involuntarily—she
might be of the family of a patrician ædile
whose office was connected with the worship of
Ceres, and she was on her way to the temple
of
the goddess on some errand.
Yet it was contrary to the young archæologist’s
feeling to put her in the frame of great, noisy,
cosmopolitan Rome. To his mind, her calm, quiet
manner did not belong in this complex
machine
where no one heeded another, but she belonged
rather in a smaller place where every
one knew
her, and, stopping to glance after her, said to a
companion, “That is Gradiva”—her
real name
Norbert could not supply—“the daughter of ——,
she walks more beautifully than
any other girl
in our city.”
As if he had heard it thus with his own ears,
the idea had become firmly rooted in his mind,
where another supposition had developed almost
into a conviction. On his Italian journey, he
16
had
spent several weeks in Pompeii studying the ruins;
and in Germany, the idea had suddenly
come to
him one day that the girl depicted by the relief
was walking there, somewhere, on the
peculiar
stepping-stones which have been excavated; these
had made a dry crossing possible in
rainy weather,
but had afforded passage for chariot-wheels. Thus
he saw her putting one foot
across the interstice
while the other was about to follow, and as he
contemplated the girl, her
immediate and more
remote environment rose before his imagination
like an actuality. It
created for him, with the
aid of his knowledge of antiquity, the vista of a
long street, among the
houses of which were many
temples and porticoes. Different kinds of business
and trades,
stalls, work-shops, taverns came into
view; bakers had their breads on display; earthenware
jugs, set into marble counters, offered everything
requisite for household and kitchen; at
the
street corner sat a woman offering vegetables
and fruit for sale from baskets; from a half-dozen
large walnuts she had removed half of
the shell to show the meat, fresh and sound, as
a
temptation for purchasers. Wherever the eye
turned, it fell upon lively colours, gaily painted
wall surfaces, pillars with red and yellow capitals;
everything reflected the glitter and glare of
the
dazzling noonday sun. Farther off on a high
base rose a gleaming, white statue, above
which,
in the distance, half veiled by the tremulous
vibrations of the hot air, loomed Mount
Vesuvius,
not yet in its present cone shape and brown
aridity, but covered to its furrowed,
rocky peak
with glistening verdure. In the street only a
few people moved about, seeking shade
17
wherever
possible, for the scorching heat of the summer
noon hour paralysed the usually
bustling activities.
There Gradiva walked over the stepping-stones
and scared away from them
a shimmering, golden-green
lizard.
Thus the picture stood vividly before Norbert Hanold’s eyes, but from daily contemplation of
her head, another new conjecture had gradually arisen. The cut of her features seemed to him,
more and more, not Roman or Latin, but Greek, so that her Hellenic ancestry gradually became
for him a certainty. The ancient settlement of all southern Italy by Greeks offered sufficient
ground for that, and more ideas pleasantly associated with the settlers developed. Then the
young “domina” had perhaps spoken Greek in
her parental home, and had grown up fostered
by Greek culture. Upon closer consideration he
found this also confirmed by the expression of
the face, for quite decidedly wisdom and a delicate
spirituality lay hidden beneath her modesty.
These conjectures or discoveries could, however,
establish no real archæological interest in the
little relief, and Norbert was well aware that something
else, which no doubt might be under
the
head of science, made him return to frequent
contemplation of the likeness. For him it was
a
question of critical judgment as to whether the
artist had reproduced Gradiva’s manner of
walking
from life. About that he could not become absolutely
certain, and his rich collection of
copies of
antique plastic works did not help him in this
matter. The nearly vertical position of
18
the right
foot seemed exaggerated; in all experiments which
he himself made, the movement
left his rising foot
always in a much less upright position; mathematically
formulated, his
stood, during the brief
moment of lingering, at an angle of only forty-five
degrees from the
ground, and this seemed to him
natural for the mechanics of walking, because it
served the
purpose best. Once he used the presence
of a young anatomist friend as an opportunity for
raising the question, but the latter was not able
to deliver a definite decision, as he had made no
observations in this connection. He confirmed the
experience of his friend, as agreeing with his
own,
but could not say whether a woman’s manner of
walking was different from that of a
man, and
the question remained unanswered.
In spite of this, the discussion had not been
without profit, for it suggested something that
had
not formerly occurred to him; namely, observation
from life for the purpose of enlightenment
on the matter. That forced him, to be sure, to
a mode of action utterly foreign to him; women
had formerly been for him only a conception in
marble or bronze, and he had never given his
feminine contemporaries the least consideration;
but his desire for knowledge transported him
into
a scientific passion in which he surrendered himself
to the peculiar investigation which he
recognized
as necessary. This was hindered by many difficulties
in the human throng of the
large city, and
results of the research were to be hoped for only
in the less frequented streets.
Yet, even there,
long skirts generally made the mode of walking
undiscernible, for almost no
19
one but housemaids
wore short skirts and they, with the exception of
a few, because of their
heavy shoes could not well
be considered in solving the question. In spite
of this he steadfastly
continued his survey in dry,
as well as in wet weather; he perceived that the
latter promised the
quickest results, for it caused
the ladies to raise their skirts. To many ladies,
his searching
glances directed at their feet must
have inevitably been quite noticeable; sometimes
a
displeased expression of the lady observed showed
that she considered his demeanour a mark
of boldness
or ill-breeding; sometimes, as he was a young
man of very captivating appearance,
the opposite,
a bit of encouragement, was expressed by a pair
of eyes. Yet one was as
incomprehensible to him
as the other. Gradually his perseverance resulted
in the collection of a
considerable number of
observations, which brought to his attention many
differences. Some
walked slowly, some fast, some
ponderously, some buoyantly. Many let their soles
merely
glide over the ground; not many raised
them more obliquely to a smarter position. Among
all,
however, not a single one presented to view
Gradiva’s manner of walking. That filled him with
satisfaction that he had not been mistaken in his
archæological judgment of the relief. On the
other
hand, however, his observations caused him annoyance,
for he found the vertical position
of the
lingering foot beautiful, and regretted that it had
been created by the imagination or
arbitrary act
of the sculptor and did not correspond to reality.
Soon after his pedestrian investigations had
yielded him this knowledge, he had, one night, a
20
dream which caused him great anguish of mind.
In it he was in old Pompeii, and on the
twenty-
fourth of August of the year 79, which witnessed
the eruption of Vesuvius. The heavens held
the
doomed city wrapped in a black mantle of smoke;
only here and there the flaring masses of
flame
from the crater made distinguishable, through a
rift, something steeped in blood-red
light; all the
inhabitants, either individually or in confused
crowd, stunned out of their senses
by the unusual
horror, sought safety in flight; the pebbles and
the rain of ashes fell down on
Norbert also, but,
after the strange manner of dreams, they did not
hurt him, and in the same
way, he smelled the
deadly sulphur fumes of the air without having
his breathing impeded by
them. As he stood thus
at the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple,
he suddenly saw
Gradiva a short distance in front
of him. Until then no thought of her presence
there had moved
him, but now suddenly it seemed
natural to him, as she was, of course, a Pompeiian
girl, that
she was living in her native city and,
without his having any suspicion of it, was his
contemporary. He recognized her at first glance;
the stone model of her was splendidly striking
in
every detail, even to her gait; involuntarily he
designated this as “lente festinans.” So with
buoyant composure and the calm unmindfulness
of her surroundings peculiar to her, she
walked
across the flagstones of the Forum to the Temple
of Apollo. She seemed not to notice
the impending
fate of the city, but to be given up to her
thoughts; on that account he also forgot
the
frightful occurrence, for at least a few moments,
and because of a feeling that the living
21
reality
would quickly disappear from him again, he tried
to impress it accurately on his mind.
Then, however,
he became suddenly aware that if she did
not quickly save herself, she must
perish in the
general destruction, and violent fear forced from
him a cry of warning. She heard
it, too, for her
head turned toward him so that her face now
appeared for a moment in full view,
yet with an
utterly uncomprehending expression; and, without
paying any more attention to
him, she continued
in the same direction as before. At the same
time, her face became paler as
if it were changing
to white marble; she stepped up to the portico of
the Temple, and then,
between the pillars, she sat
down on a step and slowly laid her head upon it.
Now the pebbles
were falling in such masses that
they condensed into a completely opaque curtain;
hastening
quickly after her, however, he found
his way to the place where she had disappeared
from his
view, and there she lay, protected by the
projecting roof, stretched out on the broad step,
as if
for sleep, but no longer breathing, apparently
stifled by the sulphur fumes. From Vesuvius the
red glow flared over her countenance, which, with
closed eyes, was exactly like that of a
beautiful
statue. No fear nor distortion was apparent, but
a strange equanimity, calmly
submitting to the
inevitable, was manifest in her features. Yet they
quickly became more
indistinct as the wind drove
to the place the rain of ashes, which spread over
them, first like a
grey gauze veil, then extinguished
the last glimpse of her face, and soon, like a
Northern winter
snowfall, buried the whole figure
under a smooth cover. Outside, the pillars of
the Temple of
22
Apollo rose, now, however, only
half of them, for the grey fall of ashes heaped itself
likewise
against them.
When Norbert Hanold awoke, he still heard the
confused cries of the Pompeiians who were
seeking
safety, and the dully resounding boom of the surf
of the turbulent sea. Then he came to
his senses;
the sun cast a golden gleam of light across his bed;
it was an April morning and
outside sounded the
various noises of the city, cries of venders, and
the rumbling of vehicles.
Yet the dream picture
still stood most distinctly in every detail before
his open eyes, and some
time was necessary before
he could get rid of a feeling that he had really
been present at the
destruction on the bay of
Naples, that night nearly two thousand years ago.
While he was
dressing, he first became gradually
free from it, yet he did not succeed, even by the
use of
critical thought, in breaking away from the
idea that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and had
been
buried there in 79. Rather, the former conjecture
had now become to him an established
certainty, and now the second also was added.
With woful feeling he now viewed in his living-
room
the old relief which had assumed new significance
for him. It was, in a way, a tombstone
by which the artist had preserved for posterity
the likeness of the girl who had so early departed
this life. Yet if one looked at her with enlightened
understanding, the expression of her whole
being
left no doubt that, on that fateful night, she had
actually lain down to die with just such
calm as
the dream had showed. An old proverb says that
the darlings of the gods are taken from
the earth
in the full vigour of youth.
23
Without having yet put on a collar, in morning
array, with slippers on his feet, Norbert leaned
on
the open window and gazed out. The spring,
which had finally arrived in the north also, was
without, but announced itself in the great quarry
of the city only by the blue sky and the soft
air,
yet a foreboding of it reached the senses, and
awoke in remote, sunny places a desire for
leaf-green,
fragrance and bird song; a breath of it
came as far as this place; the market women
on
the street had their baskets adorned with a few,
bright wild flowers, and at an open window,
a
canary in a cage warbled his song. Norbert felt
sorry for the poor fellow for, beneath the clear
tone, in spite of the joyful note, he heard the
longing for freedom and the open.
Yet the thoughts of the young archæologist
dallied but briefly there, for something else had
crowded into them. Not until then had he become
aware that in the dream he had not noticed
exactly
whether the living Gradiva had really walked as
the piece of sculpture represented her,
and as the
women of to-day, at any rate, did not walk. That
was remarkable because it was the
basis of his
scientific interest in the relief; on the other hand,
it could be explained by his
excitement over the
danger to her life. He tried, in vain, however, to
recall her gait.
Then suddenly something like a thrill passed
through him; in the first moment he could not
say
whence. But then he realized; down in the
street, with her back toward him, a female, from
figure and dress undoubtedly a young lady, was
walking along with easy, elastic step. Her
24
dress,
which reached only to her ankles, she held lifted
a little in her left hand, and he saw that
in walking
the sole of her slender foot, as it followed, rose
for a moment vertically on the tips
of the toes.
It appeared so, but the distance and the fact
that he was looking down did not admit
of
certainty.
Quickly Norbert Hanold was in the street without
yet knowing exactly how he had come there.
He had, like a boy sliding down a railing, flown like
lightning down the steps, and was running
down
among the carriages, carts and people. The latter
directed looks of wonder at him, and
from several
lips came laughing, half mocking exclamations.
He was unaware that these
referred to him; his
glance was seeking the young lady and he thought
that he distinguished her
dress a few dozen steps
ahead of him, but only the upper part; of the
lower half, and of her feet,
he could perceive
nothing, for they were concealed by the crowd
thronging on the sidewalk.
Now an old, comfortable, vegetable woman
stretched her hand toward his sleeve, stopped him
and said, half grinning, “Say, my dear, you probably
drank a little too much last night, and are
you looking for your bed here in the street? You
would do better to go home and look at
yourself
in the mirror.”
A burst of laughter from those near by proved
it true that he had shown himself in garb not
suited
to public appearance, and brought him now to
realization that he had heedlessly run from
his
room. That surprised him because he insisted upon
conventionality of attire and, forsaking
25
his project,
he quickly returned home, apparently, however,
with his mind still somewhat
confused by the
dream and dazed by illusion, for he had perceived
that, at the laughter and
exclamation, the young
lady had turned her head a moment, and he thought
he had seen not the
face of a stranger, but that of
Gradiva looking down upon him.

Because of considerable property, Doctor Norbert

Hanold was in the pleasant position of being
unhampered
master of his own acts and wishes and,
upon the appearance of any inclination, of
not
depending for expert counsel about it on any
higher court than his own decision. In this
way
he differed most favourably from the canary, who
could only warble out, without success,
his inborn
impulse to get out of the cage into the sunny open.
Otherwise, however, the young
archæologist resembled
the latter in many respects. He had not
come into the world and grown
up in natural
freedom, but already at birth had been hedged in
by the grating with which family
tradition, by
education and predestination, had surrounded him.
From his early childhood no
doubt had existed in
his parents’ house that he, as the only son of
a university professor and
antiquarian, was called
upon to preserve, if possible to exalt, by that very
activity the glory of
his father’s name; so this
business continuity had always seemed to him
the natural task of his
future. He had clung
loyally to it even after the early deaths of his
parents had left him
26
absolutely alone; in connection
with his brilliantly passed examination in
philology, he had
taken the prescribed student trip to Italy and had seen in the original a number of old works of
art whose imitations, only, had formerly been accessible to him. Nothing more instructive for
him than the collections of Florence, Rome, Naples could be offered anywhere; he could
furnish evidence that the period of his stay there had been used excellently for the enrichment
of his knowledge, and he had returned home fully satisfied to devote himself with the new
acquisitions to his science. That besides these objects from the distant past, the present still
existed round about him, he felt only in the most shadowy way; for his feelings marble and
bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed the purpose and
value of human life; and so he sat in the midst of his walls, books and pictures, with no need of
any other intercourse, but whenever possible avoiding the latter as an empty squandering of
time and only very reluctantly submitting occasionally to an inevitable party, attendance at
which was required by the connections handed down from his parents. Yet it was known that at
such gatherings he was present without eyes or ears for his surroundings, and as soon as it was
any way permissible, he always took his leave, under some pretext, at the end of the lunch or
dinner, and on the street he greeted none of those whom he had sat with at the table. That
served, especially with young ladies, to put him in a rather unfavourable light;
for upon
meeting even a girl with whom he had,
by way of exception, spoken a few words, he
looked at
27
her without a greeting as at a quite
unknown person whom he had never seen. Although
perhaps archæology, in itself, might be a rather
curious science and although its alloy had
effected
a remarkable amalgamation with Norbert Hanold’s
nature, it could not exercise much
attraction for
others and afforded even him little enjoyment in
life according to the usual views
of youth. Yet
with a perhaps kindly intent Nature had added to
his blood, without his knowing
of the possession,
a kind of corrective of a thoroughly unscientific
sort, an unusually lively
imagination which was
present not only in dreams, but often in his waking
hours, and
essentially made his mind not preponderantly
adapted to strict research method devoid
of
interest. From this endowment, however,
originated another similarity between him and the
canary. The latter was born in captivity, had
never known anything else than the cage which
confined him in narrow quarters, but he had an
inner feeling that something was lacking to him,
and sounded from his throat his desire for the
unknown. Thus Norbert Hanold understood it,
pitied him for it, returned to his room, leaned
again from the window and was thereupon moved
by a feeling that he, too, lacked a nameless something.
Meditation on it, therefore, could be of
no
use. The indefinite stir of emotion came from
the mild, spring air, the sunbeams and the
broad
expanse with its fragrant breath, and formed a
comparison for him; he was likewise
sitting in
a cage behind a grating. Yet this idea was immediately
followed by the palliating one
that his
position was more advantageous than that of the
canary, for he had in his possession
28
wings which
were hindered by nothing from flying out into the
open at his pleasure.
But that was an idea which developed more
upon reflection. Norbert gave himself up for a
time
to this occupation, yet it was not long before
the project of a spring journey assumed definite
shape. This he carried out that very day, packed
a light valise, and before he went south by the
night express, cast at nightfall another regretful
departing glance on Gradiva, who, steeped in
the
last rays of the sun, seemed to step out with more
buoyancy than ever over the invisible
stepping-stones
beneath her feet. Even if the impulse for
travel had originated in a nameless
feeling, further
reflection had, however, granted, as a matter of
course, that it must serve a
scientific purpose. It
had occurred to him that he had neglected to
inform himself with accuracy
about some important
archæological questions in connection with
some statues in Rome and,
without stopping on
the way, he made the journey of a day and a half
thither.

Not very many personally experience the beauty

of going from Germany to Italy in the spring
when
one is young, wealthy and independent, for even
those endowed with the three latter
requirements
are not always accessible to such a feeling for
beauty, especially if they (and alas
they form the
majority) are in couples on the days or weeks after
a wedding, for such allow
nothing to pass without
an extraordinary delight, which is expressed in
numerous superlatives;
29
and finally they bring
back home, as profit, only what they would have
discovered, felt or
enjoyed exactly as much by
staying there. In the spring such dualists usually
swarm over the
Alpine passes in exactly opposite
direction to the birds of passage. During the
whole journey
they billed and cooed around Norbert
as if they were in a rolling dove-cot, and for
the first time
in his life he was compelled to observe
his fellow beings more closely with eye and ear.
Although, from their speech, they were all German
country people, his racial identity with them
awoke in him no feeling of pride, but rather the
opposite one, that he had done reasonably well
to bother as little as possible with the homo sapiens
of Linnæan classification, especially in
connection
with the feminine half of this species; for the first
time he saw also, in his
immediate vicinity, people
brought together by the mating impulse without
his being able to
understand what had been the
mutual cause. It remained incomprehensible to
him why the
women had chosen these men, and
still more perplexing why the choice of the men
had fallen
upon these women. Every time he
raised his eyes, his glance had to fall on the face
of some one
of them and it found none which
charmed the eye by outer attraction or possessed
indication of
intellect or good nature. To be sure,
he lacked a standard for measuring, for of course
one could
not compare the women of to-day with
the sublime beauty of the old works of art, yet
he had a
dark suspicion that he was not to blame
for this unkind view, but that in all expressions
there
30
was something lacking which ordinary life
was in duty bound to offer. So he reflected for
many
hours on the strange impulses of human
beings, and came to the conclusion that of all
their
follies, marriage, at any rate, took the prize
as the greatest and most incomprehensible one,
and
the senseless wedding trips to Italy somehow
capped the climax of this buffoonery.
Again, however, he was reminded of the canary
that he had left behind in captivity, for he also
sat here in a cage, cooped in by the faces of young
bridal couples which were as rapturous as
vapid,
past which his glance could only occasionally stray
through the window. Therefore it
can be easily
explained that the things passing outside before
his eyes made other impressions
on him than when
he had seen them some years before. The olive
foliage had more of a silver
sheen; the solitary,
towering cypresses and pines here and there were
delineated with more
beautiful and more distinctive
outlines; the places situated on the
mountain heights seemed to
him more charming,
as if each one, in a manner, were an individual
with different expression;
and Trasimene Lake
seemed to him of a soft blue such as he had never
noticed in any surface
of water. He had a feeling
that a Nature unknown to him was surrounding
the railway tracks, as
if he must have passed
through these places before in continual twilight,
or during a grey
rainfall, and was now seeing
them for the first time in their golden abundance
of colour. A few
times he surprised himself in a
desire, formerly unknown to him, to alight and
seek afoot the
way to this or that place because it
looked to him as if it might be concealing something
31
peculiar or mysterious. Yet he did not allow
himself to be misled by such unreasonable
impulses,
but the “diretissimo” took him directly
to Rome where, already, before the entrance
into
the station, the ancient world with the ruins of
the temple of Minerva Medica received him.
When he had finally freed himself from his cage
filled with “inseparables,” he immediately
secured
accommodations in a hotel well known to him, in
order to look about from there,
without excessive
haste, for a private house satisfactory to him.
Such a one he had not yet found in the course
of the next day, but returned to his “albergo”
again in the evening and went to sleep rather
exhausted by the unaccustomed Italian air, the
strong sun, much wandering about and the noise
of the streets. Soon consciousness began to
fade,
but just as he was about to fall asleep he was
again awakened, for his room was connected
with
the adjoining one by a door concealed only by a
wardrobe, and into this came two guests,
who had
taken possession of it that morning. From the
voices which sounded through the thin
partition,
they were a man and a woman who unmistakably
belonged to that class of German
spring birds of
passage with whom he had yesterday journeyed
hither from Florence. Their
frame of mind
seemed to give decidedly favourable testimony
concerning the hotel cuisine, and
it might be due
to the good quality of a Castellin-romani wine
that they exchanged ideas and
feelings most distinctly
and audibly in North German tongue:
“My only Augustus.”
“My sweet Gretchen.”
“Now again we have each other.”
32
“Yes, at last we are alone again.”
“Must we do more sight-seeing to-morrow?”
“At breakfast we shall look in Baedeker for
what is still to be done.”
“My only Augustus, to me you are much more
pleasing than Apollo Belvedere.”
“And I have often thought, my sweet Gretchen,
that you are much more beautiful than the
Capitoline Venus.”
“Is the volcano that we want to climb near
here?”
“No, I think we’ll have to ride a few hours
more in the train to get there.”
“If it should begin to belch flame just as we
got to the middle, what would you do?”
“Then my only thought would be to save you,
and I would take you in my arms—so.”
“Don’t scratch yourself on that pin!”
“I can think of nothing more beautiful than to
shed my blood for you.”
“My only Augustus.”
“My sweet Gretchen.”
With that the conversation ceased, Norbert
heard another ill-defined rustling and moving of
chairs, then it became quiet and he fell back into
a doze which transported him to Pompeii just
as Vesuvius again began its eruption. A vivid
throng of fleeing people caught him, and among
them he saw Apollo Belvedere lift up the Capitoline
Venus, take her away and place her safely
upon some object in a dark shadow; it seemed to
be a carriage or cart on which she was to be
carried
off, for a rattling sound was soon heard from that
direction. This mythological
33
occurrence did not
amaze the young archæologist, but it struck him
as remarkable that the two
talked German, not
Greek, to each other for, as they half regained
their senses, he heard them
say:
“My sweet Gretchen.”
“My only Augustus.”
But after that the dream picture changed completely.
Absolute silence took the place of the
confused sound, and instead of smoke and fire-glow,
bright, hot sunlight rested on the ruins of
the buried city. This likewise changed gradually,
became a bed on whose white linen golden
beams
circled up to his eyes, and Norbert Hanold awoke
in the scintillating spring morning of
Rome.
Within him, also, however, something had
changed; why, he could not surmise, but a
strangely
oppressive feeling had again taken possession
of him, a feeling that he was imprisoned in
a
cage which this time was called Rome. As he
opened the window, there screamed up from the
street dozens of venders’ cries far more shrill to
his ear than those in his German home; he had
come only from one noisy quarry to another, and a
strangely uncanny horror of antique
collections,
of meeting there Apollo Belvedere or the Capitoline
Venus, frightened him away.
Thus, after
brief consideration, he refrained from his intention
of looking for a dwelling, hastily
packed his valise
again and went farther south by train. To escape
the “inseparables,” he did
this in a third-class
coach, expecting at the same time to find there
an interesting and
scientifically useful company
of Italian folk-types, the former models of antique
works of art.
34
Yet he found nothing but the usual
dirt, Monopol cigars which smelled horribly, little
warped
fellows beating about with arms and legs,
and members of the female sex, in contrast to
whom
his coupled country-women seemed to his
memory almost like Olympian goddesses.

Two days later Norbert Hanold occupied a

rather questionable space called a “room” in
“Hotel
Diomed” beside the eucalyptus-guarded
“ingresso” to the excavations of Pompeii. He
had
intended to stay in Naples for some time to
study again more closely the sculptures and wall-
paintings
in the Museo Nazionale, but he had
had an experience there similar to that in Rome.
In the room for the collection of Pompeiian household
furniture he found himself wrapped in a
cloud of feminine, ultra-fashionable travel-costumes,
which had doubtless all quickly replaced
the virgin
radiance of satin, silk or lace bridal finery; each
one clung to the arm of a young or
old companion,
likewise faultlessly attired, according to men’s
fashion standards; and
Norbert’s newly gained
insight into a field of knowledge formerly unknown
to him had
advanced so far as to permit him to
recognize them at first glance; every man was
Augustus,
every girl was Gretchen. Only this
came to light here by means of other forms of
conversation
tempered, moderated and modified by
the ear of publicity.
“Oh, look, that was practical of them; we’ll
surely have to get a meat warmer like that, too.”
“Yes, but for the food that my wife cooks it
must be made of silver.”
35
“How do you know that what I cook will taste
so good to you?”
The question was accompanied by a roguish,
arch glance and was answered in the affirmative,
with a glance varnished with lacquer, “What you
serve to me can be nothing but delicious.”
“No; that surely is a thimble! Did the people
of those days have needles?”
“It almost seems so, but you could not have
done anything with that, my darling, it would be
much too large even for your thumb.”
“Do you really think that? And do you like
slender fingers better than broad ones?”
“Yours I do not need to see; by touch I could
discover them, in the deepest darkness, among all
the others in the world.”
“That is really awfully interesting. Do we still
really have to go to Pompeii also?”
“No, that will hardly pay; there are only old
stones and rubbish there; whatever was of value,
Baedeker says, was brought here. I fear the sun
there would be too hot for your delicate
complexion,
and I could never forgive myself that.”
“What if you should suddenly have a negress
for a wife?”
“No, my imagination fortunately does not reach
that far, but a freckle on your little nose would
make me unhappy. I think, if it is agreeable to
you, we’ll go to Capri to-morrow, my dear.
There
everything is said to be very comfortable, and in
the wonderful light of the Blue Grotto I
shall first
realize completely what a great prize I have drawn
in the lottery of happiness.”
36
“You—if any one hears that, I shall be almost
ashamed. But wherever you take me, it is
agreeable
to me, and makes no difference, for I have
you with me.”
Augustus and Gretchen over again, somewhat toned down and tempered for eye and ear. It
seemed to Norbert Hanold that he had had thin honey poured upon him from all sides and that
he had to dispose of it swallow by swallow. A sick feeling came over him, and he ran out of the
Museo Nazionale to the nearest “osteria” to drink a glass of vermuth. Again and again the
thought intruded itself upon his mind: Why did these hundredfold dualities fill the museums of
Florence, Rome, Naples, instead of devoting themselves to their plural occupations in their
native Germany? Yet from a number of chats and tender talks, it seemed to him that the
majority of these bird couples did not intend to nest in the rubbish of Pompeii, but considered a
side trip to
Capri much more profitable, and thence originated
his sudden impulse to do what
they did not do.
There was at any rate offered to him a chance to
be freed from the main flock
of this migration
and to find what he was vainly seeking here in
Italy. That was also a duality,
not a wedding
duality, but two members of the same family
without cooing bills, silence and
science, two
calm sisters with whom only one could count
upon satisfactory shelter. His desire
for them
contained something formerly unknown to him;
if it had not been a contradiction in
itself, he
could have applied to this impulse the epithet
“passionate”—and an hour later he was
37
already
sitting in a “carrozzella” which bore him through
the interminable Portici and Resina.
The journey
was like one through a street splendidly adorned
for an old Roman victor; to the
right and left
almost every house spread out to dry in the sun,
like yellow tapestry hangings, a
super-abundant
wealth of “pasta di Napoli,” the greatest dainty
of the country, thick or thin
macaroni, vermicelli,
spaghetti, canelloni and fidelini, to which smoke
of fats from cook-shops,
dust-clouds, flies and
fleas, the fish scales flying about in the air, chimney
smoke and other day
and night influences lent
the familiar delicacy of its taste. Then the cone of
Vesuvius looked
down close by across brown lava
fields; at the right extended the gulf of shimmering
blue, as if
composed of liquid malachite and
lapis lazuli. The little nutshell on wheels flew,
as if whirled
forth by a mad storm and as
if every moment must be its last, over the
dreadful pavement of
Torre del Greco, rattled
through Torre dell’Annunziata, reached the Dioscuri,
“Hotel Suisse”
and “Hotel Diomed,” which
measured their power of attraction in a ceaseless,
silent, but
ferocious struggle, and stopped before
the latter whose classic name, again, as on his
first visit,
had determined the choice of the
young archæologist. With apparently, at least, the
greatest
composure, however, the modern Swiss
competitor viewed this event before its very door.
It
was calm because no different water from what
it used was boiled in the pots of its classic
neighbour;
and the antique splendours temptingly displayed
for sale over there had not come to
light
again after two thousand years under the ashes,
any more than the ones which it had.
38
Thus Norbert Hanold, contrary to all expectations
and intentions, had been transported in a
few
days from northern Germany to Pompeii,
found the “Diomed” not too much filled with
human
guests, but on the other hand populously
inhabited by the musca domestica communis, the
common house-fly. He had never been subject
to violent emotions; yet a hatred of these two-
winged
creatures burned within him; he considered
them the basest evil invention of Nature,
on
their account much preferred the winter to the
summer as the only time suited to human life,
and
recognized in them invincible proof against the
existence of a rational world-system. Now
they
received him here several months earlier than he
would have fallen to their infamy in
Germany,
rushed immediately about him in dozens, as upon
a patiently awaited victim,
whizzed before his
eyes, buzzed in his ears, tangled themselves in his
hair, tickled his nose,
forehead and hands.
Therein many reminded him of honeymoon
couples, probably were also
saying to each other
in their language, “My only Augustus” and “My
sweet Gretchen”; in the
mind of the tormented
man rose a longing for a “scacciamosche,” a splendidly
made fly-flapper
like one unearthed from
a burial vault, which he had seen in the Etruscan
museum in Bologna.
Thus, in antiquity, this
worthless creature had likewise been the scourge
of humanity, more
vicious and more inevitable
than scorpions, venomous snakes, tigers and sharks,
which were
bent upon only physical injury, rending
or devouring the ones attacked; against the
former one
39
could guard himself by thoughtful
conduct. From the common house-fly, however,
there was
no protection, and it paralysed, disturbed
and finally shattered the psychic life of
human beings,
their capacity for thinking and
working, every lofty flight of imagination and
every beautiful
feeling. Hunger or thirst for blood
did not impel them, but solely the diabolical
desire to
torture; it was the “Ding an sich” in
which absolute evil had found its incarnation.
The Etruscan
“scacciamosche,” a wooden handle
with a bunch of fine leather strips fastened to it,
proved the
following: they had destroyed the
most exalted poetic thoughts in the mind of
Æschylus; they
had caused the chisel of Phidias
to make an irremediable slip, had run over the
brow of Zeus,
the breast of Aphrodite, and from
head to foot of all Olympian gods and goddesses;
and
Norbert felt in his soul that the service of
a human being was to be estimated, above all,
according to the number of flies which he had
killed, pierced, burned up or exterminated in
hecatombs during his life, as avenger of his whole
race from remotest antiquity.
For the achievement of such fame, he lacked
here the necessary weapon, and like the greatest
battle hero of antiquity, who had, however, been
alone and unable to do otherwise, he left the
field,
or rather his room, in view of the hundredfold
overwhelming number of the common foe.
Outside
it dawned upon him that he had thereby done
in a small way what he would have to
repeat on
a larger scale on the morrow. Pompeii, too,
apparently offered no peacefully
40
gratifying abode
for his needs. To this idea was added, at least
dimly, another, that his
dissatisfaction was certainly
caused not by his surroundings alone, but
to a degree found its
origin in him. To be sure,
flies had always been very repulsive to him, but
they had never
before transported him into such
raging fury as this. On account of the journey
his nerves were
undeniably in an excited and
irritable condition, for which indoor air and overwork
at home
during the winter had probably
begun to pave the way. He felt that he was out
of sorts because
he lacked something without
being able to explain what, and this ill-humour
he took
everywhere with him; of course flies and
bridal couples swarming en masse were not
calculated
to make life agreeable anywhere. Yet if he
did not wish to wrap himself in a thick
cloud of
self-righteousness, it could not remain concealed
from him that he was travelling
around Italy just
as aimless, senseless, blind and deaf as they, only
with considerably less
capacity for enjoyment.
For his travelling companion, science, had, most
decidedly, much of an
old Trappist about her, did
not open her mouth when she was not spoken to,
and it seemed to
him that he was almost forgetting
in what language he had communed with her.
It was now too late in the day to go into Pompeii
through the “ingresso.” Norbert remembered a
circuit he had once made on the old city-wall, and
attempted to mount the latter by means of all
sorts of bushes and wild growth. Thus he wandered
along for some distance a little above the
city of graves, which lay on his right, motionless
and quiet. It looked like a dead rubbish field
41
already almost covered with shadow, for the
evening sun stood in the west not far from the
edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Round about, on the
other hand, it still bathed all the hilltops and
fields
with an enchanting brilliancy of life, gilded the
smoke-cone rising above the Vesuvius
crater and
clad the peaks and pinnacles of Monte Sant’ Angelo
in purple. High and solitary rose
Monte Epomeo
from the sparkling, blue sea glittering with golden
light, from which Cape
Misenum reared itself with
dark outline, like a mysterious, titanic structure.
Wherever the gaze
rested, a wonderful picture was
spread combining charm and sublimity, remote
past and joyous
present. Norbert Hanold had
expected to find here what he longed for vaguely.
Yet he was not
in the mood for it, although no
bridal couples and flies molested him on the
deserted wall; even
nature was unable to offer
him what he lacked in his surroundings and within
himself. With a
calmness bordering closely on
indifference, he let his eyes pass over the all-pervading
beauty,
and did not regret in the least
that it was growing pale and fading away in the
sunset, but
returned to the “Diomed,” as he had
come, dissatisfied.

But as he had now, although with ill-success,

been conveyed to this place through his
indiscretion,
he reached the decision overnight, to get
from the folly he had committed at least
one day
of scientific profit, and went to Pompeii on the
regular road as soon as the “ingresso”
was opened
in the morning. In little groups commanded by
official guides, armed with red
Baedekers or their
foreign cousins, longing for secret excavations of
their own, there wandered 42

before and behind him

the population of the two hotels. The still fresh,
morning air was filled
almost exclusively by English
or Anglo-American chatter; the German couples
were making
each other mutually happy with
German sweets and inspiration up there on Capri
behind Monte
Sant’ Angelo at the breakfast table
of the Pagano. Norbert remembered how to free
himself
soon, by well chosen words, combined with
a good “mancia,” from the burden of a “guida,”
and was able to pursue his purposes alone and
unhindered. It afforded him some satisfaction to
know that he possessed a faultless memory; wherever
his glance rested, everything lay and
stood
exactly as he remembered it, as if only yesterday
he had imprinted it in his mind by
means of expert
observation. This continually repeated experience
brought, however, the added
feeling that his
presence there seemed really very unnecessary, and
a decided indifference took
possession of his eyes
and his intellect more and more, as during the
evening on the wall.
Although, when he looked
up, the pine-shaped smoke-cone of Vesuvius generally
stood before
him against the blue sky, yet,
remarkably, it did not once appear in his memory
that he had
dreamed some time ago that he had
been present at the destruction of Pompeii by the
volcanic
eruption of 79. Wandering around for
hours made him tired and half-sleepy, of course,
yet he
felt not the least suggestion of anything
dreamlike, but there lay about him only a confusion
of
43
fragments of ancient gate arches, pillars
and walls significant to the highest degree for

archæology, but, viewed without the esoteric aid

of this science, really not much else than a big
pile of rubbish, neatly arranged, to be sure, but
extremely devoid of interest; and although
science
and dreams were wont formerly to stand on
footings exactly opposed, they had
apparently
here to-day come to an agreement to withdraw
their aid from Norbert Hanold and
deliver him
over absolutely to the aimlessness of his walking
and standing around.
So he had wandered in all directions from the
Forum to the Amphitheatre, from the Porta di
Stabia to the Porta del Vesuvio through the Street
of Tombs as well as through countless others,
and
the sun had likewise, in the meanwhile, made its
accustomed morning journey to the
position where
it usually changes to the more comfortable descent
toward the sea. Thereby, to
the great satisfaction
of their misunderstood, hoarsely eloquent guides,
it gave the English and
American men and women,
forced to go there by a traveller’s sense of duty,
a signal to become
mindful of the superior comfort
of sitting at the lunch-tables of the twin hotels;
besides, they
had seen with their own eyes everything
that could be required for conversation on
the other
side of the ocean and channel; so the
separate groups, satiated by the past, started on
the return,
ebbed in common movement down
through the Via Marina, in order not to lose meals
at the, to
be sure somewhat euphemistically Lucullan,
tables of the present, in the house of “Diomed”
or
of Mr. Swiss. In consideration of all the outer
and inner circumstances, this was doubtless also
44
the wisest thing that they could do, for the noon
sun of May was decidedly well disposed
toward
the lizards, butterflies and other winged inhabitants
or visitors of the extensive mass of
ruins, but
for the northern complexion of a Madame or Miss
its perpendicular obtrusiveness
was unquestionably
beginning to become less kindly, and, supposedly
in some causal
connection with that, the “charmings”
had already in the last hour considerably
diminished, the
“shockings” had increased in the
same proportion, and the masculine “ah’s” proceeding
from
rows of teeth even more widely distended
than before had begun a noticeable
transition to
yawning.
It was remarkable, however, that simultaneously
with their vanishing, what had formerly been
the
city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed
appearance, but not a living one; it now
appeared
rather to be becoming completely petrified in dead
immobility. Yet out of it stirred a
feeling that
death was beginning to talk, although not in a
manner intelligible to human ears. To
be sure,
here and there was a sound as if a whisper were
proceeding from the stone which,
however, only
the softly murmuring south wind, Atabulus, awoke,
he who, two thousand years
ago, had buzzed in
this fashion about the temples, halls and houses,
and was now carrying on
his playful game with
the green, shimmering stalks on the low ruins.
From the coast of Africa
he often rushed across,
casting forth wild, full blasts: he was not doing
that to-day, but was
gently fanning again the old
acquaintances which had come to light again. He
could not,
45
however, refrain from his natural tendency
to devastate, and blew with hot breath, even
though
lightly, on everything that he encountered
on the way.
In this, the sun, his eternally youthful mother,
helped him. She strengthened his fiery breath,
and accomplished, besides, what he could not,
steeped everything with trembling, glittering,
dazzling splendour. As with a golden eraser, she
effaced from the edges of the houses on the
semitæ
and crepidine viarum, as the sidewalks were once
called, every slight shadow, cast into
all the
vestibules, inner courts, peristyles and balconies
her luminous radiance, or desultory
rays where a
shelter blocked her direct approach. Hardly anywhere
was there a nook which
successfully protected
itself against the ocean of light and veiled itself in
a dusky, silver web;
every street lay between the
old walls like long, rippling, white strips of linen
spread out to
bleach; and without exception all
were equally motionless and mute, for not only
had the last of
the rasping and nasal tones of the
English and American messengers disappeared, but
the
former slight evidences of lizard- and butterfly-life
seemed also to have left the silent city of
ruins.
They had not really done so, but the gaze perceived
no more movement from them.
As had been the custom of their ancestors out on the mountain slopes and cliff walls for
thousands of years, when the great Pan laid himself to sleep, here, too, in order not to disturb
him, they had stretched themselves out motionless or, folding their wings, had squatted here
and there; and it seemed as if, in this place, they felt even more strongly the command of the
46
hot, holy, noonday quiet in whose ghostly hour life must be silent and
suppressed, because
during it the dead awake and
begin to talk in toneless spirit-language.
This changed aspect which the things round about
had assumed really thrust itself less upon the
vision
than it aroused the emotions, or, more correctly,
an unnamed sixth sense; this latter,
however, was
stimulated so strongly and persistently that a
person endowed with it could not
throw off the
effect produced upon him. To be sure, of those
estimable boarders already busy
with their soup
spoons at the two “alberghi” near the “ingresso,”
hardly a man or woman would
have been counted
among those thus invested, but Nature had once
bestowed this great
attention upon Norbert Hanold
and he had to submit to its effects, not at all because
he had an
understanding with it, however, for he
wished nothing at all and desired nothing more
than that
he might be sitting quietly in his study
with an instructive book in his hand, instead of
having
undertaken this aimless spring journey.
Yet as he had turned back from the Street of
Tombs
through the Hercules gate into the centre
of the city, and at Casa di Sallustio had turned to
the
left, quite without purpose or thought, into the
narrow “vicolo,” suddenly that sixth sense was
awakened in him; but this last expression was
not really fitting, rather he was transported by it
into a strangely dreamy condition, about half-way
between a waking state and loss of senses.
As if
guarding a secret, everywhere round about him,
suffused in light, lay deathly silence, so
breathless
that even his own lungs hardly dared to take in
air. He stood at the intersection of
47
two streets
where the Vicolo Mercurio crossed the broader
Strada di Mercurio, which stretched
out to right
and left; in answer to the god of commerce,
business and trades had formerly had
their abodes
here; the street corners spoke silently of it; many
shops with broken counters,
inlaid with marble,
opened out upon them; here the arrangement
indicated a bakery, there, a
number of large, convex,
earthenware jugs, an oil or flour business. Opposite
more slender,
two-handled jars set into the counters
showed that the space behind them had been a
bar-room;
surely in the evening, slaves and maids
of the neighbourhood might have thronged here to
get
wine for their masters in their own jugs; one
could see that the now illegible inscription inlaid
with mosaic on the sidewalk in front of the shop
was worn by many feet; probably it had held
out
to passers-by a recommendation of the excellent
wine. On the outer wall, at about half the
height
of a man, was visible a “graffito” probably
scratched into the plastering, with his finger-
nail
or an iron nail, by a schoolboy, perhaps derisively
explaining the praise, in this way, that
the owner’s
wine owed its peerlessness to a generous addition of
water. For from the scratch
there seemed raised
before Norbert Hanold’s eyes the word “caupo,”
or was it an illusion.
Certainly he could not settle
it. He possessed a certain skill in deciphering
“graffiti” which
were difficult, and had already
accomplished widely recognized work in that field,
yet at this
time it completely failed him. Not only
that, he had a feeling that he did not understand
any
Latin, and it was absurd of him to wish to
read what a Pompeiian school youth had scratched
into the wall two thousand years before.
48
Not only had all his science left him, but it
left him without the least desire to regain it; he
remembered it as from a great distance, and he
felt that it had been an old, dried-up, boresome
aunt, dullest and most superfluous creature in the
world. What she uttered with puckered lips
and
sapient mien, and presented as wisdom, was all vain,
empty pompousness, and merely
gnawed at the dry
rind of the fruit of knowledge without revealing
anything of its content, the
germ of life, or bringing
anything to the point of inner, intelligent enjoyment.
What it taught
was a lifeless, archæological
view, and what came from its mouth was a dead,
philological
language. These helped in no way to
a comprehension with soul, mind and heart, as the
saying
is, but he, who possessed a desire for that,
had to stand alone here, the only living person in
the
hot noonday silence among the remains of the
past, in order not to see with physical eyes nor
hear with corporeal ears. Then something came
forth everywhere without movement and a
soundless
speech began; then the sun dissolved the tomblike
rigidity of the old stones, a
glowing thrill
passed through them, the dead awoke, and Pompeii
began to live again.
The thoughts in Norbert Hanold’s mind were not
really blasphemous, but he had an indefinite
feeling
deserving of that adjective, and with this, standing
motionless, he looked before him
down the Strada
di Mercurio toward the city-wall. The angular
lava-blocks of its pavement still
lay as faultlessly
fitted together as before the devastation, and each
one was of a light-grey
49
colour, yet such dazzling
lustre brooded over them that they stretched like
a quilted silver-white
ribbon passing in faintly
glowing void between the silent walls and by the
side of column
fragments.
Then suddenly—
With open eyes he gazed along the street, yet it
seemed to him as if he were doing it in a dream.
A little to the right something suddenly stepped
forth from the Casa di Castore e Polluce, and
across the lava stepping-stones, which led from the
house to the other side of the Strada di
Mercurio,
Gradiva stepped buoyantly.
Quite indubitably it was she; even if the sunbeams
did surround her figure as with a thin veil
of
gold, he perceived her in profile as plainly and
as distinctly as on the bas-relief. Her head,
whose
crown was entwined with a scarf which fell to her
neck, inclined forward a little; her left
hand held
up lightly the extremely voluminous dress and, as
it reached only to her ankles, one
could perceive
clearly that in advancing, the right foot, lingering,
if only for a moment, rose on
the tips of the toes
almost perpendicularly. Here, however, it was not
a stone representation,
everything in uniform
colourlessness; the dress, apparently made of
extremely soft, clinging
material, was not of cold
marble-white, but of a warm tone verging faintly
on yellow, and her
hair, wavy under the scarf on
her brow, and peeping forth at the temples, stood
out, with
golden-brown radiance, in bold contrast
to her alabaster countenance.
As soon as he caught sight of her, Norbert’s
memory was clearly awakened to the fact that he
had seen her here once already in a dream, walking
thus, the night that she had lain down as if
50
to
sleep over there in the Forum on the steps of the
Temple of Apollo. With this memory he
became
conscious, for the first time, of something else; he
had, without himself knowing the
motive in his
heart, come to Italy on that account and had,
without stop, continued from Rome
and Naples to
Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of her—and
that in a literal sense—for,
with her unusual
gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a
foot-print different from all the
others.
Again it was a noonday dream-picture that passed
there before him and yet also a reality. For
that
was apparent from an effect which it produced.
On the last stepping-stone on the farther
side,
there lay stretched out motionless, in the burning
sunlight, a big lizard, whose body, as if
woven of
gold and malachite, glistened brightly to Norbert’s
eyes. Before the approaching foot,
however, it
darted down suddenly and wriggled away over the
white, gleaming lava pavement.
Gradiva crossed the stepping-stones with her calm
buoyancy, and now, turning her back,
walked along
on the opposite sidewalk; her destination seemed
to be the house of Adonis.
Before it she stopped
a moment, too, but passed then, as if after further
deliberation, down
farther through the Strada di
Mercurio. On the left, of the more elegant buildings,
there now
stood only the Casa di Apollo,
named after the numerous representations of Apollo
excavated
there, and, to the man who was gazing
after her, it seemed again that she had also surely
chosen
the portico of the Temple of Apollo for her
death sleep. Probably she was closely associated
51
with the cult of the sun-god and was going there.
Soon, however, she stopped again; stepping-
stones
crossed the street here, too, and she walked back
again to the right side. Thus she turned
the other
side of her face toward him and looked a little
different, for her left hand, which held
up her
gown, was not visible and instead of her curved
arm, the right one hung down straight.
At a
greater distance now, however, the golden waves
of sunlight floated around her with a
thicker web
of veiling, and did not allow him to distinguish
where she had stopped, for she
disappeared suddenly
before the house of Meleager. Norbert Hanold still
stood without having
moved a limb. With his
eyes, and this time with his corporeal ones, he had
surveyed, step by
step, her vanishing form. Now,
at length, he drew a deep breath, for his breast
too had remained
almost motionless.
Simultaneously the sixth sense, suppressing the
others completely, held him absolutely in its
sway.
Had what had just stood before him been a product
of his imagination or a reality?
He did not know that, nor whether he was awake
or dreaming, and tried in vain to collect his
thoughts.
Then, however, a strange shudder passed down
his spine. He saw and heard nothing,
yet he felt
from the secret inner vibrations that Pompeii had
begun to live about him in the
noonday hour of
spirits, and so Gradiva lived again, too, and had
gone into the house which she
had occupied before
the fateful August day of the year 79.
From his former visit, he was acquainted with
the Casa di Meleagro, had not yet gone there this
time, however, but had merely stopped briefly in
the Museo Nazionale of Naples before the
52
wall
paintings of Meleager and his Arcadian huntress
companion, Atalanta, which had been
found in the
Strada di Mercurio in that house, and after which
the latter had been named. Yet as
he now again
acquired the ability to move and walked toward it,
he began to doubt whether it
really bore its name
after the slayer of the Caledonian boar. He
suddenly recalled a Greek poet,
Meleager, who, to
be sure, had probably lived about a century before
the destruction of
Pompeii. A descendant of his,
however, might have come here and built the
house for himself.
That agreed with something
else that had awakened in his memory, for he
remembered his
supposition, or rather a definite
conviction, that Gradiva had been of Greek descent.
To be sure
there mingled with his idea the figure
of Atalanta as Ovid had pictured it in his
Metamorphoses:
                       —her floating vest
A polished buckle clasped—her careless locks
In simple knot were gathered—
 
                          Trans. by Henry King.
He could not recall the verses word for word,
but their content was present in his mind; and
from his store of knowledge was added the fact
that Cleopatra was the name of the young wife
of
Œneus’ son, Meleager. More probably this had
nothing to do with him, but with the Greek
poet,
Meleager. Thus, under the glowing sun of the
Campagna, there was a mythological-
literary-historical-archæological
juggling in his head.
When he had passed the house of Castor and
Pollux and that of the Centaur, he stood before
the
53
Casa di Meleagro from whose threshold there
looked up at him, still discernible, the inlaid
greeting “Ave.” On the wall of the vestibule,
Mercury was handing Fortuna a pouch filled with
money; that probably indicated, allegorically, the
riches and other fortunate circumstances of
the
former dweller. Behind this opened up the inner
court, the centre of which was occupied by
a marble
table supported by three griffins.
Empty and silent, the room lay there, appearing
absolutely unfamiliar to the man, as he entered,
awaking no memory that he had already been
here, yet he then recalled it, for the interior of the
house offered a deviation from that of the other
excavated buildings of the city. The peristyle
adjoined the inner court on the other side of the
balcony toward the rear—not in the usual way,
but
at the left side and on that account was of greater
extent and more splendid appearance than
any
other in Pompeii. It was framed by a colonnade
supported by two dozen pillars painted red
on the
lower, and white on the upper half. These lent
solemnity to the great, silent space; here
in the
centre was a spring with a beautifully wrought
enclosure, which served as a fish-pool.
Apparently
the house must have been the dwelling of an
estimable man of culture and artistic
sense.
Norbert’s gaze passed around, and he listened.
Yet nowhere about did anything stir, nor was
the
slightest sound audible. Amidst this cold stone
there was no longer a breath; if Gradiva had
gone
into Meleager’s house, she had already dissolved
again into nothing. At the rear of the
peristyle
was another room, an œcus, the former dining-room,
likewise surrounded on three
54
sides by pillars
painted yellow, which shimmered from a distance
in the light, as if they were
encrusted with gold.
Between them, however, shone a red far more
dazzling than that from the
walls, with which no
brush of antiquity, but young Nature of the present
had painted the
ground. The former artistic pavement
lay completely ruined, fallen to decay and
weather worn;
it was May which exercised here
again its most ancient dominion and covered the
whole œcus,
as it did at the time in many houses of the buried city, with red, flowering, wild poppies, whose
seeds the winds had carried thither, and these had sprouted in the ashes. It was a wave of
densely crowded blossoms, or so it appeared, although, in reality, they stood there motionless,
for Atabulus found no way down to them, but only hummed away softly above. Yet the sun
cast such flaming, radiant vibrations down upon them that it gave an impression of red ripples
in a pond undulating hither and thither. Norbert Hanold’s eyes had passed unheeding over a
similar sight in other houses, but here he was strangely thrilled by it. The dream-flower grown
at the edge of Lethe filled the space, and Hypnos lay stretched in their midst dispensing sleep,
which dulls the senses, with the saps which night has gathered in the red chalices. It seemed to
the man who had entered the dining-room through the portico of the peristyle as if he felt his
temples touched by the invisible slumber wand of the old vanquisher of gods and men, but not
with heavy stupor; only a dreamily sweet loveliness floated about his consciousness. At the
55
same time, however, he still remained in control of his feet and stepped along by the wall
of the
former dining-room from which gazed old
pictures: Paris, awarding the apple; a satyr,
carrying
in his hand an asp and tormenting a young
Bacchante with it.
But there again suddenly, unforeseen—only about
five paces away from him—in the narrow
shadow
cast down by a single piece of the upper part of
the dining-room portico, which still
remained in a
state of preservation, sitting on the low steps
between two of the yellow pillars
was a brightly clad
woman who now raised her head. In that way she
disclosed to the unnoticed
arrival, whose footstep
she had apparently just heard, a full view of her
face, which produced in
him a double feeling, for
it appeared to him at the same time unknown and
yet also familiar,
already seen or imagined; but
by his arrested breathing and his heart palpitations,
he
recognized, unmistakably, to whom it belonged.
He had found what he was looking for, what
had
driven him unconsciously to Pompeii; Gradiva
continued her visible existence in the
noonday
spirit hour and sat here before him, as, in the
dream, he had seen her on the steps of
the Temple
of Apollo. Spread out on her knees lay something
white, which he was unable to
distinguish clearly;
it seemed to be a papyrus sheet, and a red poppy-blossom
stood out from it
in marked contrast.
In her face surprise was expressed; under the
lustrous, brown hair and the beautiful, alabaster
brow, two rarely bright, starlike eyes looked at
him with questioning amazement. It required
only
a few moments for him to recognize the conformity
of her features with those of the
56
profile. They must
be thus, viewed from the front, and therefore, at
first glance, they had not
been really unfamiliar
to him. Near to, her white dress, by its slight
tendency to yellow,
heightened still more the warm
colour; apparently it consisted of a fine, extremely
soft, woollen
material, which produced abundant
folds, and the scarf around her head was of the
same.
Below, on the nape of the neck, appeared
again the shimmering, brown hair artlessly gathered
in a single knot; at her throat, under a dainty
chin, a little gold clasp held her gown together.
Norbert Hanold dimly perceived that involuntarily
he had raised his hand to his soft Panama
hat and removed it; and now he said in Greek,
“Are you Atalanta, the daughter of Jason, or are
you a descendant of the family of the poet,
Meleager?”
Without giving an answer, the lady addressed
looked at him silently with a calmly wise
expression
in her eyes, and two thoughts passed through his
mind; either her resurrected self
could not speak,
or she was not of Greek descent and was ignorant
of the language. He
therefore substituted Latin
for it and asked: “Was your father a distinguished
Pompeiian citizen
of Latin origin?”
To this she was equally silent, only about her
delicately curved lips there was a slight quiver as
if she were repressing a burst of laughter. Now
a feeling of fright came upon him; apparently
she was sitting there before him like a silent image,
a phantom to whom speech was denied.
Consternation
at this discovery was stamped fully
and distinctly upon his features.
57
Then, however, her lips could no longer resist
the impulse; a real smile played about them and

at the same time a voice sounded from between

them, “If you wish to speak with me, you must
do so in German.”
That was really remarkable from the mouth of
a Pompeiian woman who had died two centuries
before, or would have been so for a person hearing
it in a different state of mind. Yet every
oddity
escaped Norbert because of two waves of emotion
which had rushed over him, one
because Gradiva
possessed the power of speech, and the other was
one which had been forced
from his inmost being
by her voice. It sounded as clear as was her
glance; not sharp, but
reminiscent of the tones of
a bell, her voice passed through the sunny silence
over the blooming
poppy-field, and the young
archæologist suddenly realized that he had already
heard it thus in
his imagination, and involuntarily
he gave audible expression to his feeling, “I knew
that your
voice sounded like that.”
One could read in her countenance that she was
seeking comprehension of something, but was
not
finding it. To his last remark she now responded,
“How could you? You have never talked
with
me.”
To him it was not at all remarkable that she
spoke German, and, according to present usage,
addressed him formally; as she did it, he understood
completely that it could not have happened
otherwise, and he answered quickly, “No—not
talked—but I called to you when you lay down
to sleep and stood near you then—your face was
as calmly beautiful as if it were of marble.
May
I beg you—rest it again on the step in that way.”
58
While he was speaking, something peculiar had
occurred. A golden butterfly, faintly tinged
with
red on the inner edge of its upper wing, fluttered
from the poppies toward the pillars,
flitted a few
times about Gradiva’s head and then rested on
the brown, wavy hair above her
brow. At the
same time, however, she rose, slender and tall,
for she stood up with deliberate
haste, curtly and
silently directed at Norbert another glance, in
which something suggested that
she considered
him demented; then, thrusting her foot forward,
she walked out in her
characteristic way along the
pillars of the old portico. Only fleetingly visible
for a while, she
finally seemed to have sunk into
the earth.
He stood up, breathless, as if stunned; yet with
heavy understanding he had grasped what had
occurred before his eyes. The noonday ghost hour
was over, and in the form of a butterfly, a
winged
messenger had come up from the asphodel meadows
of Hades to admonish the
departed one to return.
For him something else was associated with this,
although in confused
indistinctness. He knew that
the beautiful butterfly of Mediterranean countries
bore the name
Cleopatra, and this had also been
the name of Caledonian Meleager’s young wife
who, in grief
over his death, had given herself
as sacrifice to those of the lower world.
From his mouth issued a call to the girl who
was departing, “Are you coming here again to-
morrow
in the noon hour?” Yet she did not turn
around, gave no answer, and disappeared after
a
few moments in the corner of the dining-room
behind the pillar. Now a compelling impulse
59
suddenly incited him to hasten after her, but her
bright dress was no longer visible anywhere;
glowing with the hot sun’s rays, the Casa di
Meleagro lay about him motionless and silent;
only
Cleopatra hovered on her red, shimmering,
golden wings, making slow circles again above the
multitude of poppies.

When and how he had returned to the “ingresso,”

Norbert Hanold could not recall; in his
memory
he retained only the idea that his appetite had
peremptorily demanded to be appeased,
though
very tardily, at the “Diomed,” and then he had
wandered forth aimlessly on the first
good street,
had arrived at the beach north of Castellamare,
where he had seated himself on a
lava-block, and
the sea-wind had blown around his head until the
sun had set about half-way
between Monte Sant’
Angelo above Sorrento and Monte Epomeo on
Ischia. Yet, in spite of this
stay of at least several
hours by the water, he had obtained from the
fresh air there no mental
relief, but was returning
to the hotel in the same condition in which he
had left it. He found the
other guests busily
occupied with dinner, had a little bottle of Vesuvio
wine brought to him in a
corner of the room, viewed
the faces of those eating, and listened to their
conversations. From
the faces of all, as well as
from their talk, it appeared to him absolutely
certain that in the noon
hour none of them had
either met or spoken to a dead Pompeiian woman
who had returned
again briefly to life. Of course,
all this had been a foregone conclusion, as they
had all been at
60
lunch at that time; why and
wherefore, he himself could not state, yet after a
while he went
over to the competitor of the
“Diomed,” “Hotel Suisse,” sat down there also in
a corner, and, as
he had to order something, likewise
before a little bottle of Vesuvio, and here he gave
himself
over to the same kind of investigations
with eye and ear. They led to the same results
but also
to the further conclusion that he now
knew by sight all the temporary, living visitors
of
Pompeii. To be sure, this effected an increase
of his knowledge which he could hardly consider
an enrichment, but from it he experienced a certain
satisfying feeling that, in the two hostelries,
no
guest, either male or female, was present with
whom, by means of sight and hearing, he had
not
entered into a personal, even if one-sided, relation.
Of course, in no way had the absurd
supposition
entered his mind that he might possibly meet
Gradiva in one of the two hotels, but
he could
have taken his oath that no one was staying in
them who possessed, in the remotest
way, any trace
of resemblance to her. During his observations,
he had occasionally poured wine
from his little
bottle to his glass, and had drunk from time to
time; and when, in this manner,
the former had
gradually become empty, he rose and went back
to the “Diomed.” The heavens
were now strewn
with countless, flashing, twinkling stars, but not
in the traditionally stationary
way, for Norbert
gathered the impression that Perseus, Cassiopeia
and Andromeda with some
neighbours, bowing
lightly hither and thither, were performing a
singing dance, and below, on
61
earth, too, it seemed
to him that the dark shadows of the tree-tops and
buildings did not stay in
the same place. Of course
on the ground of this region—unsteady from ancient
times—this
could not be exactly surprising, for the
subterranean glow lurked everywhere, after an
eruption,
and let a little of itself rise in the vines
and grapes from which was pressed Vesuvio, which
was
not one of Norbert Hanold’s usual evening
drinks. He still remembered, however, even if a
little of the circular movement of things might be
ascribed to the wine, too, that since noon all
objects
had displayed an inclination to whirl softly about
his head, and therefore he found, in
the slight
increase, nothing new, but only a continuation of
the formerly existing conditions. He
went up to
his room and stood for a little while at the open
window, looking over toward the
Vesuvius mound,
above which now no cone of smoke spread its top,
but rather something like
the fluctuations of a
dark, purple cloak flowed back and forth around it.
Then the young
archæologist undressed, without
having lighted the light, and sought his couch.
Yet, as he
stretched himself out upon it, it was
not his bed at the “Diomed,” but a red poppy-field
whose
blossoms closed over him like a soft cushion
heated by the sun. His enemy, the common house-
fly,
constrained by darkness to lethargic stupidity,
sat fiftyfold above his head, on the wall, and
only
one moved, even in its sleepiness, by desire to
torture, buzzed about his nose. He
recognized it,
however, not as the absolute evil, the century-old
scourge of humanity, for before
his eyes it poised
like a red-gold Cleopatra.
62
When, in the morning, the sun, with lively
assistance from the flies, awoke him, he could not

recall what, besides strange, Ovid-like metamorphoses,

had occurred during the night about his
bed. Yet doubtless some mystic being, continuously
weaving dream-webs, had been sitting
beside
him, for he felt his head completely overhung and
filled with them, so that all ability to
think lay
inextricably imprisoned in it and only one thing
remained in his consciousness; he
must again be
in Meleager’s house at exactly noon. In this connection,
however, a fear
overcame him, for if the
gatekeepers at the “ingresso” looked at him, they
would not let him in.
Anyway it was not advisable
that he should expose himself to close observation
by human
eyes. To escape that, there was, for
one well informed about Pompeii, a means which
was, to
be sure, against the rules, but he was not
in a condition to grant to legal regulation a
determination
of his conduct. So he climbed again,
as on the evening of his arrival, along the
old
city-wall, and upon it walked, in a wide semicircle,
around the city of ruins to the solitary,
unguarded
Porta di Nola. Here it was not difficult to get
down into the inside and he went,
without burdening
his conscience very much over the fact that by
his autocratic deed he had
deprived the administration
of a two-lira entrance fee, which he could,
of course, let it have
later in some other way.
Thus, unseen, he had reached an uninteresting
part of the city, never before investigated by any
one and still mostly unexcavated; he sat down in
a secluded, shady nook and waited, now and
then
drawing his watch to observe the progress of time.
Once his glance fell upon something in
63
the distance
gleaming, silvery-white, rising from the ashes, but
with his unreliable vision, he
was unable to distinguish
what it was. Yet involuntarily he was
impelled to go up to it and there
it stood, a
tall, flowering asphodel-plant with white, bell-like
blossoms whose seeds the wind
had carried thither
from outside. It was the flower of the lower
world, significant and, as he felt,
destined to grow
here for his purpose. He broke the slender stem
and returned with it to his
seat. Hotter and hotter
the May sun burned down as on the day before,
and finally approached
its noonday position; so
now he started out through the long Strada di
Nola. This lay deathly
still and deserted, as did
almost all the others; over there to the west all
the morning visitors
were already crowding again
to the Porta Marina and the soup-plates. Only
the air, suffused
with heat, stirred, and in the
dazzling glare the solitary figure of Norbert Hanold
with the
asphodel branch appeared like that of
Hermes, Psyche’s escort, in modern attire, starting
out
upon the journey to conduct a departed soul
to Hades.
Not consciously, yet following an instinctive
impulse, he found his way through the Strada
della
Fortuna farther along to the Strada di Mercurio,
and turning to the right arrived at the
Casa di
Meleagro. Just as lifelessly as yesterday, the
vestibule, inner court and peristyle
received him,
and between the pillars of the latter the poppies
of the dining-room flamed across
to him. As he
entered, however, it was not clear to him whether
he had been here yesterday or
two thousand years
ago to seek from the owner of the house some
information of great
64
importance to archæology;
what it was, however, he could not state, and besides, it seemed to
him, even though in contradiction to the above, that all the science of antiquity was the most
purposeless and indifferent thing in the world. He could not understand how a human being
could occupy himself with it, for there was only a single thing to which all thinking and
investigation must be directed: what is the nature of the physical manifestation of a being like
Gradiva, dead and alive at the same time, although the latter was true only in the noon hour of
spirits—or had been the day before, perhaps the one time in a century or a thousand years, for it
suddenly seemed certain that his return to-day was in vain.
He did not meet the girl he was
looking for, because
she was not allowed to come again until a time
when he too would have
been dead for many
years, and was buried and forgotten. Of course,
as he walked now along by
the wall below Paris
awarding the apple, he perceived Gradiva before
him, just as on yesterday,
in the same gown,
sitting between the same two yellow pillars on
the same step. Yet he did not
allow himself to
be deceived by tricks of imagination, but knew
that fancy alone was
deceptively depicting before
his eyes what he had really seen there the day
before. He could not
refrain, however, from stopping
to indulge in the view of the shadowy apparition
created by
himself and, without his knowing it,
there passed from his lips in a grieved tone the
words,
“Oh, that you were still alive!”
His voice rang out, but, after that, breathless
silence again reigned among the ruins of the old
65
dining-room. Yet soon another sounded through
the vacant stillness, saying, “Won’t you sit
down
too? You look exhausted.”
Norbert Hanold’s heart stood still a moment.
His head, however, collected this much reason; a
vision could not speak; or was an aural hallucination
practising deception upon him? With
fixed
gaze, he supported himself against the pillar.
Then again asked the voice, and it was the one
which none other than Gradiva possessed, “Are
you bringing me the white flowers?”
Dizziness rushed upon him; he felt that his feet
no longer supported him, but forced him to be
seated; and he slid down opposite her on the step,
against the pillar. Her bright eyes were
directed
toward his face, yet with a different look from the
one with which she had gazed at
him yesterday
when she suddenly rose and went away. In that,
something ill-humoured and
repellent had spoken;
but it had disappeared, as if she had, in the meanwhile,
arrived at a
different view-point, and an
expression of searching inquisitiveness or curiosity
had taken its
place. Likewise, she spoke with an
easy familiarity. As he remained silent, however,
to the last
question also, she again resumed, “You
told me yesterday that you had once called to me
when
I lay down to sleep and that you had afterwards
stood near me; my face was as white as
marble.
When and where was that? I cannot
remember it, and I beg you to explain more
exactly.”
Norbert had now acquired enough power of
speech to answer, “In the night when you sat on
the steps of the Temple of Apollo in the Forum
and the fall of ashes from Vesuvius covered
you.”
66
“So—then. Yes, to be sure—that had not
occurred to me, but I might have thought that it
would
be a case like that. When you said it
yesterday, I was not expecting it, and I was utterly
unprepared. Yet that happened, if I recall
correctly, two thousand years ago. Were you
living
then? It seems to me you look younger.”
She spoke very seriously, but at the end a faint,
extremely sweet smile played about her mouth.
He hesitated in embarrassment and answered,
stuttering slightly, “No, I really don’t believe I
was alive in the year 79—it was perhaps—yes,
it
surely is a psychic condition which is called a
dream that transported me into the time of the
destruction of Pompeii—but I recognized you again
at first glance.”
In the expression of the girl sitting opposite
him, a few feet away, surprise was apparent, and
she repeated in a tone of amazement, “You
recognized me again? In the dream? By
what?”
“At the very first; by your manner of walking.”
“Had you noticed that? And have I a special
manner of walking?”
Her astonishment had grown perceptibly. He
replied, “Yes—don’t you realize that? A more
graceful one—at least among those now living—does
not exist. Yet I recognized you
immediately
by everything else too, your figure, face, bearing
and drapery, for everything
agreed most minutely
with the bas-relief of you in Rome.”
“Ah, really—” she repeated in her former
tone—“with the bas-relief of me in Rome. Yes,
I
67
hadn’t thought of that either, and at this moment
I don’t know exactly—what is it—and you
saw it
there then?”
Now he told her that the sight of it had
attracted him so that he had been highly pleased
to get a
plaster-cast of it in Germany, and that
for years it had hung in his room. He observed it
daily,
and the idea had come to him that it must
represent a young Pompeiian girl who was walking
on the stepping-stones of a street in her native
city; and the dream had confirmed it. Now he
knew also that he had been impelled by it to travel
here again to see whether he could find
some trace
of her; and as he had stood yesterday noon at
the corner of Strada di Mercurio, she,
herself,
exactly like her image, had suddenly walked before
him across the stepping-stones, as
if she were about
to go over into the house of Apollo. Then farther
along she had recrossed the
street and disappeared
before the house of Meleager.
To this she nodded and said, “Yes, I intended
to look up the house of Apollo, but I came here.”
He continued, “On that account the Greek poet,
Meleager, came to my mind, and I thought that
you were one of his descendants and were returning—in
the hour which you are allowed—to
your
ancestral home. When I spoke to you in Greek,
however, you did not understand.”
“Was that Greek? No, I don’t understand it
or I’ve probably forgotten it. Yet as you came
again
just now, I heard you say something that
I could understand. You expressed the wish that
some
one might still be alive here. Only I did not
understand whom you meant by that.”
68
That caused him to reply that, at sight of her,
he had believed that it was not really she, but that
his imagination was deceptively putting her image
before him in the place where he had met
her
yesterday. At that she smiled and agreed, “It
seems that you have reason to be on your
guard
against an excess of imagination, although, when
I have been with you, I never supposed
so.” She
stopped, however, and added, “What is there
peculiar about my way of walking,
which you
spoke of before?”
It was noteworthy that her aroused interest
brought her back to that, and he said, “If I may
ask
——”
With that he stopped, for he suddenly remembered
with fear that yesterday she had suddenly
risen
and gone away when he had asked her to lie down
to sleep again on that step, as on that of
the Temple
of Apollo, and, associated darkly with this, there
came to him the glance which she
had directed
upon him in departing. Yet now the calm, friendly
expression of her eyes
remained, and as he spoke
no further, she said, “It was nice that your wish
that some one might
still be alive concerned me.
If you wish to ask anything of me on that account,
I will gladly
respond.”
That overcame his fear, and he replied, “It
would make me happy to get a close view of you
walking as you do in the bas-relief.”
Willingly, without answering, she stood up and
walked along between the wall and the pillars.
It
was the very buoyantly reposeful gait, with the
sole raised almost perpendicularly, that was
so
firmly imprinted on his mind, but for the first time
he saw that she wore, below the raised
69
gown, not
sandals, but light, sand-coloured shoes of fine
leather. When she came back and sat
down again
silently, he involuntarily started to talk of the
difference in her foot-covering from
that of the
bas-relief. To that she rejoined, “Time, of course,
always changes everything, and
for the present
sandals are not suitable, so I put on shoes, which
are a better protection against
rain and dust; but
why did you ask me to walk before you? What is
there peculiar about it?”
Her repeated wish to learn this proved her not
entirely free from feminine curiosity. He now
explained that it was a matter of the peculiarly
upright position of the rising foot, as she
walked,
and he added how for weeks he had tried to observe
the gait of modern women on the
streets in his
native city. Yet it seemed that this beautiful way
of walking had been completely
lost to them, with
the exception, perhaps, of a single one who had
given him the impression
that she walked in that
way. To be sure, he had not been able to establish
this fact because of
the crowd about her, and he
had probably experienced an illusion, for it had
seemed to him that
her features had resembled
somewhat those of Gradiva.
“What a shame,” she answered. “For confirmation
of the fact would surely have been of
great
scientific importance, and if you had succeeded,
perhaps you would not have needed to take
the
long journey here; but whom were you just
speaking of? Who is Gradiva?”
“I have named the bas-relief that, because I
didn’t know your real name, and don’t know it yet,
either.”
70
This last he added with some hesitancy, and she
faltered a moment before replying to the
indirect
question. “My name is Zoë.”
With pained tone the words escaped him: “The
name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me
like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life.’”
“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,” she
responded, “and I have long accustomed
myself to
being dead; but now my time is over for to-day;
you have brought the grave-flower
with you to
conduct me back. So give it to me.”
As she rose and stretched forth her slender hand,
he gave her the asphodel cluster, but was
careful
not to touch her fingers. Accepting the flowering
branch she said, “I thank you. To
those who are
more fortunate one gives roses in spring, but for
me the flower of oblivion is the
right one from your
hand. To-morrow I shall be allowed to come here
again at this hour. If your
way leads you again
into the house of Meleager, we can sit together at
the edge of the poppies,
as we did to-day. On
the threshold stands ‘Ave,’ and I say it to you
‘Ave’!”
She went out and disappeared, as yesterday, at
the turn in the portico, as if she had there sunk
into the ground. Everything lay empty and silent
again, but, from some distance, there once
rang,
short and clear, a sound like the merry note of a
bird flying over the devastated city. This
was
stifled immediately, however. Norbert, who had
remained behind, looked down at the step
where
she had just been sitting; there something white
shimmered; it seemed to be the papyrus
71
leaf which
Gradiva had held on her knees yesterday and had
forgotten to take with her to-day.
Yet, as he
shyly reached for it, he found it to be a little sketch-book
with pencil drawings of the
different ruins
in several houses of Pompeii. The page next to the
last showed a drawing of the
griffin-table in the
central court of the Casa di Meleagro, and on
the last was the beginning of a
reproduction of
the view across the poppies of the dining-room
through the row of pillars of the
peristyle. That
the departed girl made drawings in a sketch-book
of the present mode was as
amazing as had been
the fact that she expressed her thoughts in German.
Yet those were only
insignificant prodigies beside
the great one of her revivification, and apparently
she used the
midday hour of freedom to preserve for
herself, in their present state, with unusual artistic
talent, the surroundings in which she had once
lived. The drawings testified to delicately
cultivated
powers of perception, as each of her words
did to a clever intellect; and she had
probably
often sat by the old griffin-table, so that it was a
particularly precious reminder.
Mechanically Norbert also went, with the little
book, along the portico, and at the place where
this
turned he noticed in the wall a narrow cleft wide
enough to afford, to an unusually slender
figure,
passage into the adjoining building, and even
farther to the Vicolo del Fauno at the other
side
of the house. Suddenly, however, the idea flashed
through his mind that Zoë-Gradiva did
not sink
into the ground here—that was essentially unreasonable,
and he could not understand
how he had
ever believed it—but went, on this street, back to
her tomb. That must be in the
Street of Tombs,
and rushing forth, he hastened out into the Strada
di Mercurio and as far as the 72

gate of Hercules;
but when, breathless and reeking with perspiration,
he entered this, it was
already too late. The broad
Strada di Sepolcri stretched out empty and dazzlingly
white, only at
its extremity, behind the
glimmering curtain of radiance, a faint shadow
seemed to dissolve
uncertainly before the Villa of
Diomede.

Norbert Hanold passed the second half of the

day with a feeling that Pompeii was everywhere,
or at least wherever he stopped, veiled in a cloud
of mist. It was not grey, gloomy and
melancholy
as formerly, but rather cheerful and vari-coloured
to an extraordinary degree; blue,
red and brown,
chiefly a light-yellowish white and alabaster white,
interwoven with golden
threads of sunbeams. This
injured neither his power of vision nor that of
hearing, only, because
of it, thinking was impossible,
and that produced a cloud-wall whose effect rivalled
the thickest
mist. To the young archæologist it
seemed almost as if hourly, in an invisible and not
otherwise
noticeable way, there was brought to
him a little bottle of Vesuvio wine, which produced
a
continuous whirling in his head. From this he
instinctively sought to free himself by the use of
correctives, on the one hand drinking water frequently,
and on the other hand moving about as
much and as far as possible. His knowledge of
medicine was not comprehensive, but it helped
him
to the diagnosis that this strange condition must
arise from excessive congestion of blood
73
in his
head, perhaps associated with accelerated action
of the heart; for he felt the latter—
something
formerly quite unknown to him—occasionally beating
fast against his chest.
Otherwise, his thoughts,
which could not penetrate into the outer world,
were not in the least
inactive within, or more
exactly, there was only one thought there, which
had come into sole
possession and carried on a
restless, though vain activity. It continually turned
about the
question of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva
might possess, whether during her stay in
the
house of Meleager she was a corporeal being or
only an illusory representation of what she had
formerly been. For the former, physical, physiological
and anatomical facts seemed to argue
that
she had at her disposal organs of speech, and could
hold a pencil with her fingers. Yet
Norbert was
overwhelmed with the idea that if he should touch
her, even lightly place his hand
on hers, he would
then encounter only empty air. A peculiar impulse
urged him to make sure of
this, but an equally
great timidity hindered him from even thinking of
doing it. For he felt that
the confirmation of either
of the two possibilities must bring with it something
inspiring fear.
The corporeal existence of
the hand would thrill him with horror, and its
lack of substance
would cause him deep pain.
Occupied vainly with this problem, which was impossible to solve scientifically without
experiment, he arrived, in the course of his extensive wanderings that afternoon, at the foothills
of the
big mountain group of Monte Sant’ Angelo, rising
south from Pompeii, and here he
74
unexpectedly
came upon an elderly man, already grey-bearded,
who, from his equipment with
all sorts of implements,
seemed to be a zoologist or botanist, and
appeared to be making a
search on a hot, sunny
slope. He turned his head as Norbert came close
to him, looked at the
latter in surprise for a moment
and then said, “Are you interested in Faraglionensis?
I should
hardly have supposed it, but it
seems thoroughly probable that they are found,
not only in the
Faraglioni of Capri, but also
dwell permanently on the mainland. The method
suggested by my
colleague, Eimer, is really good;
I have already used it often with the best of success.
Please
remain quite still——”
The speaker stopped, stepped carefully forward
a few paces and, stretched out motionless on
the
ground, held a little snare, made of a long grass-blade,
before a narrow crevice in the rock,
from
which the blue, chatoyant little head of a lizard
peeped. Thus the man remained without
the
slightest movement, and Norbert Hanold turned
about noiselessly behind him and returned
by the
way he had come. It seemed to him dimly that
he had already seen the face of the lizard-
hunter
once, probably in one of the two hotels; to this
fact the latter’s manner pointed. It was
hardly
credible what foolishly remarkable purposes could
cause people to make the long trip to
Pompeii;
happy that he had succeeded in so quickly ridding
himself of the snare-layer, and
being again able
to direct his thoughts to the problem of corporeal
reality or unreality, he
started on the return. Yet
a side street misled him once to a wrong turn
and took him, instead of
75
to the west boundary, to
the east end of the extensive old city-wall; buried
in thought, he did
not notice the mistake until he
had come right up to a building which was neither
the “Diomed”
nor the “Hotel Suisse.” In spite
of this it bore the sign of an hotel; near by he
recognized the
ruins of the large Pompeiian amphitheatre,
and the memory came to him that near
this latter
there was another hotel, the “Albergo del
Sole,” which, on account of its remoteness from the
station, was sought out by only a few guests, and
had remained unknown to even him. The
walk
had made him hot; besides, the cloudy whirling
in his head had not diminished; so he
stepped in
through the open door and ordered the remedy
deemed useful by him for blood
congestion, a bottle
of lime-water. The room stood empty except, of
course, for the fly-visitors
gathered in full numbers,
and the unoccupied host availed himself of the
opportunity to
recommend highly his house and
the excavated treasures it contained. He pointed
suggestively
to the fact that there were, near
Pompeii, people at whose places there was not a
single genuine
piece among the many objects
offered for sale, but that all were imitations, while
he, satisfying
himself with a smaller number, offered
his guests only things undoubtedly genuine. For
he
acquired no articles which he himself had not
seen brought to the light of day, and, in the
course
of his eloquence, he revealed that he had also been
present when they had found near the
Forum the
young lovers who had clasped each other in firm
embrace when they realized their
inevitable destruction,
and had thus awaited death. Norbert had
already heard of this discovery,
76
but had shrugged
his shoulders about it as a fabulous invention of
some especially imaginative
narrator, and he did
so now, too, when the host brought in to him, as
authentic proof, a metal
brooch encrusted with
green patina, which, in his presence, had been
gathered with the remains
of the girl from the
ashes. When the arrival at the “Sun Hotel” took it
in his own hand,
however, the power of imagination
exercised such ascendency over him that suddenly,
without
further critical consideration, he paid for
it the price asked from English people, and, with his
acquisition, hastily left the “Albergo del Sole,” in
which, after another turn, he saw in an open
window,
nodding down, an asphodel branch covered with
white blossoms, which had been
placed in a water-glass;
and without needing any logical connection,
it rushed through his
mind, at the sight of the grave-flower,
that it was an attestation of the genuineness
of his new
possession.
This he viewed with mingled feelings of excitement
and shyness, keeping now to the way
along
the city-wall to Porta Marina. Then it was no
fairy tale that a couple of young lovers had
been
excavated near the Forum in such an embrace,
and there at the Apollo temple he had seen
Gradiva
lie down to sleep, but only in a dream; that he
knew now quite definitely; in reality she
might
have gone on still farther from the Forum, met
some one and died with him.
From the green brooch between his fingers a
feeling passed through him that it had belonged to
Zoë-Gradiva, and had held her dress closed at the
throat. Then she was the beloved fiancée,
perhaps
the young wife of him with whom she had wished
to die.
77
It occurred to Norbert Hanold to hurl the brooch
away. It burned his fingers as if it had become
glowing, or more exactly, it caused him the pain
such as he had felt at the idea that he might
put
his hand on that of Gradiva and encounter only
empty air.
Reason, nevertheless, asserted the upper hand;
he did not allow himself to be controlled by
imagination against his will. However probable it
might be, there was still lacking invincible
proof
that the brooch had belonged to her and that it
had been she who had been discovered in
the young
man’s arms. This judgment made it possible for
him to breathe freely, and when at
the dawn of twilight
he reached the “Diomed,” his long wandering
had brought to his sound
constitution need of
physical refreshment. Not without appetite did he
devour the rather
Spartan evening meal which the
“Diomed,” in spite of its Argive origin, had adopted,
and he
then noticed two guests newly-arrived in
the course of the afternoon. By appearance and
language they marked themselves as Germans, a
man and a woman; they both had youthful,
attractive
features endowed with intellectual expressions;
their relation to each other could not
be determined,
yet, because of a certain resemblance, Norbert
decided that they were brother
and sister. To
be sure the young man’s fair hair differed in colour
from her light-brown tresses.
In her gown she
wore a red Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as
he looked across from his
corner, stirred something
in his memory without his being able to think what
it was. The couple
78
were the first people he had
met on his journey who seemed possibly congenial.
They talked
with one another, over a little bottle,
in not too plainly audible tones, nor in cautious
whisperings, apparently sometimes about serious
things and sometimes about gay things, for at
times there passed over her face a half-laughing
expression which was very becoming to her,
and
aroused the desire to participate in their conversation,
or perhaps might have awakened it
in Norbert,
if he had met them two days before in the room
otherwise populated only by Anglo-
Americans. Yet
he felt that what was passing through his mind
stood in too strong contrast to
the happy naïveté
of the couple about whom there undeniably lay
not the slightest cloud, for
they doubtless were not
meditating profoundly over the essential nature of
a girl who had died
two thousand years ago, but,
without any weariness, were taking pleasure in
an enigmatical
problem of their life of the present.
His condition did not harmonize with that; on the
one hand
he seemed superfluous to them, and on
the other, he recoiled from an attempt to start
an
acquaintance with them, for he had a dark
feeling that their bright, merry eyes might look
through his forehead into his thoughts and thereby
assume an expression as if they did not
consider
him quite in his right mind. Therefore he went
up to his room, stood, as yesterday, at
the window,
looking over to the purple night-mantle of Vesuvius,
and then he lay down to rest.
Exhausted, he soon
fell asleep and dreamed, but remarkably nonsensically.
Somewhere in the
sun Gradiva sat
making a trap out of a blade of grass in order to
catch a lizard, and she said,
79
“Please stay quite
still—my colleague is right; the method is really
good, and she has used it
with the greatest
success.”
Norbert Hanold became conscious in his dream
that it was actually the most utter madness, and
he
cast about to free himself from it. He succeeded
in this by the aid of an invisible bird, who
seemingly
uttered a short, merry call, and carried the lizard
away in its beak; afterwards
everything disappeared.

On awakening he remembered that in the night

a voice had said that in the spring one gave
roses,
or rather this was recalled to him through his eyes,
for his gaze, passing down from the
window, came
upon a bright bush of red flowers. They were of
the same kind as those which
the young lady had
worn in her bosom, and when he went down he
involuntarily plucked a
couple and smelled of
them. In fact, there must be something peculiar
about Sorrento roses, for
their fragrance seemed to
him not only wonderful, but quite new and unfamiliar,
and at the
same time he felt that they
had a somewhat liberating effect upon his mind.
At least they freed
him from yesterday’s timidity
before the gatekeepers, for he went, according to
directions, in
through the “ingresso” to Pompeii,
paid double the amount of admission fee, and
quickly struck
out upon streets which took him
from the vicinity of other visitors. The little
sketch-book from
the house of Meleager he carried
along with the green brooch and the red roses,
but the
fragrance of the latter had made him forget
to eat breakfast, and his thoughts were not in the
80
present, but were directed exclusively to the noon
hour, which was still far off; he had to pass
the
remaining interval, and for this purpose he entered
now one house, now another, as a result
of which
activity the idea probably occurred to him that
Gradiva had also walked there often
before or even
now sought these places out sometimes—his supposition
that she was able to do
it only at noon
was tottering. Perhaps she was at liberty to do
it in other hours of the day,
possibly even at night
in the moonlight. The roses strengthened this
supposition strangely for
him, when he inhaled, as
he held them to his nose; and his deliberations,
complaisant, and open
to conviction, made advances
to this new idea, for he could bear witness that he
did not cling to
preconceived opinions at all, but
rather gave free rein to every reasonable objection,
and such
there was here without any doubt, not
only logically, but desirably valid. Only the
question
arose whether, upon meeting her then,
the eyes of others could see her as a corporeal
being, or
whether only his possessed the ability to
do that. The former was not to be denied, claimed
even probability for itself, transformed the desirable
thing into quite the opposite, and
transported him
into a low-spirited, restless mood. The thought
that others might also speak to
her and sit down
near her to carry on a conversation with her made
him indignant; to that he
alone possessed a claim,
or at any rate a privilege, for he had discovered
Gradiva, of whom no
one had formerly known,
had observed her daily, taken her into his life, to
a degree, imparted
to her his life-strength, and it
seemed to him as if he had thereby again lent to
her life that she
81
would not have possessed without
him. Therefore he felt that there devolved upon
him a right,
to which he alone might make a claim,
and which he might refuse to share with anyone else.
The advancing day was hotter than the two
preceding; the sun seemed to have set her mind
to-
day on a quite extraordinary feat, and made it
regrettable, not only in an archæological, but also
in a practical connection, that the water system
of Pompeii had lain burst and dried up for two
thousand years. Street fountains here and there
commemorated it and likewise gave evidence of
their informal use by thirsty passers-by, who had,
in order to bend forward to the jet, leaned a
hand
on the marble railing and gradually dug out a sort
of trough in the place, in the same way
that dropping
wears away stone; Norbert observed this at
a corner of the Strada della Fortuna,
and from
that the idea occurred to him that the hand of
Zoë-Gradiva, too, might formerly have
rested here
in that way, and involuntarily he laid his hand into
the little hollow, yet he
immediately rejected the
idea, and felt annoyance at himself that he could
have done it; the
thought did not harmonize at
all with the nature and bearing of the young
Pompeiian girl of a
refined family; there was
something profane in the idea that she could have
bent over so and
placed her lips on the very pipe
from which the plebeians drank with coarse mouths.
In a noble
sense, he had never seen anything more
seemly than her actions and movements; he was
frightened by the idea that she might be able to see
by looking at him that he had had the
incredibly
unreasonable thought, for her eyes possessed something
penetrating; a couple of
82
times, when he had
been with her, the feeling had seized him that she
looked as if she were
seeking for access to his inmost
thoughts and were looking about them as if with
a bright steel
probe. He was obliged, therefore,
to take great care that she might come upon
nothing foolish
in his mental processes.
It was now an hour until noon and in order to
pass it, he went diagonally across the street into
the Casa del Fauno, the most extensive and
magnificent of all the excavated houses. Like no
other, it possessed a double inner court and showed,
in the larger one, on the middle of the
ground,
the empty base on which had stood the famous
statue of the dancing faun after which
the house
had been named. Yet there stirred in Norbert
Hanold not the least regret that this
work of art,
valued highly by science, was no longer here, but,
together with the mosaic picture
of the Battle of
Alexander, had been transferred to the Museo
Nazionale in Naples; he
possessed no further
intention nor desire than to let time move along,
and he wandered about
aimlessly in this place
through the large building. Behind the peristyle
opened a wider room,
surrounded by numerous
pillars, planned either as another repetition of the
peristyle or as an
ornamental garden; so it seemed
at present for, like the dining-room of the Casa
di Meleagro, it
was completely covered with
poppy-blooms. Absent-mindedly the visitor passed
through the
silent dereliction.
Then, however, he stopped and rested on one
foot; but he found himself not alone here; at
some
83
distance his glance fell upon two figures,
who first gave the impression of only one, because

they stood as closely as possible to each other. They did not see him, for they were concerned
only with themselves, and, in that corner, because of the pillars, might have believed
themselves undiscoverable by any other eyes. Mutually embracing each other, they held their
lips also pressed together, and the unsuspected spectator recognized, to his amazement, that
they were the young man
and woman who had last evening seemed to him
the first congenial
people encountered on this trip.
For brother and sister, their present position, the
embrace and
the kiss, it seemed to him had lasted
too long. So it was surely another pair of lovers,
probably
a young bridal couple, an Augustus and
Gretchen, too.
Strange to relate, however, the two latter did
not, at the moment, enter Norbert’s mind, and the
incident seemed to him not at all ridiculous nor
repulsive, rather it heightened his pleasure in
them.
What they were doing seemed to him as natural as
it did comprehensible; his eyes clung
to the living
picture, more widely open than they ever had been
to any of the most admired
works of art, and he
would have gladly devoted himself for a longer
time to his observation.
Yet it seemed to him
that he had wrongfully penetrated into a consecrated
place and was on the
point of disturbing a secret
act of devotion; the idea of being noticed there
struck terror to his
heart, and he quickly turned,
went back some distance noiselessly on tiptoe and,
when he had
passed beyond hearing distance, ran
out with bated breath and beating heart to the
Vicolo del
Fauno.

84
When he arrived before the house of Meleager,
he did not know whether it was already noon,
and
did not happen to question his watch about it, but
remained before the door, standing
looking down
with indecision for some time at the “Ave” in the
entrance. A fear prevented him
from stepping in,
and strangely, he was equally afraid of not meeting
Gradiva within, and of
finding her there; for,
during the last few moments, he had felt quite
sure that, in the first case,
she would be staying
somewhere else with some younger man, and, in the
second case, the
latter would be in company with
her on the steps between the pillars. Toward the
man,
however, he felt a hate far stronger than
against all the assembled common house-flies; until
to-
day he had not considered it possible that he
could be capable of such violent inner excitement.
The duel, which he had always considered stupid
nonsense, suddenly appeared to him in a
different
light; here it became a natural right which the
man injured in his own rights, or
mortally insulted,
made use of as the only available means to secure
satisfaction or to part with
an existence which had
become purposeless. So he suddenly stepped forward
to enter; he
would challenge the bold man
and would—this rushed upon him almost more
powerfully—
express unreservedly to her that he
had considered her something better, more noble,
and
incapable of such vulgarity.
He was so filled to the brim with this rebellious
idea that he uttered it, even though there was
not
apparently the least occasion for it, for, when he
had covered the distance to the dining-
85
room with
stormy haste, he demanded violently, “Are you
alone?” although appearances
allowed of no doubt
that Gradiva was sitting there on the steps, just
as much alone as on the
two previous days.
She looked at him amazed and replied, “Who
should still be here after noon? Then the people
are all hungry and sit down to meals. Nature
has arranged that very happily for me.”
His surging excitement could not, however, be
allayed so quickly, and without his knowledge
or
desire, he let slip, with the conviction of certainty,
the conjecture which had come over him
outside;
for he added, to be sure somewhat foolishly, that
he could really not think otherwise.
Her bright eyes remained fixed upon his face until
he had finished. Then she made a motion
with one
finger against her brow and said, “You——”
After that, however, she continued, “It
seems to
me quite enough that I do not remain away from
here, even though I must expect that
you are
coming here at this time; but the place pleases me,
and I see that you have brought me
my sketch-book
that I forgot here yesterday. I thank you
for your vigilance. Won’t you give it
to me?”
The last question was well founded, for he
showed no disposition to do so, but
remained
motionless. It began to dawn upon him that he
had imagined and worked out a
monstrous piece
of nonsense, and had also given expression to it;
in order to compensate, as far
as possible, he now
stepped forward hastily, handed Gradiva the book,
and at the same time sat
down near her on the
step, mechanically. Casting a glance at his hand,
she said, “You seem to
be a lover of roses.”
86
At these words he suddenly became conscious
of what had caused him to pluck and bring them
and he responded, “Yes,—of course, not for myself,
have I—you spoke yesterday—and last
night, too,
some one said it to me—people give them in spring.”
She pondered briefly before she answered, “Ah,
so—yes, I remember. To others, I meant, one
does not give asphodel, but roses. That is polite
of you; it seems your opinion of me is
improved.”
Her hand stretched out to receive the red flowers,
and, handing them to her, he rejoined, “I
believed
at first that you could be here only during the
noon hour, but it has become probable to
me that
you also, at some other time—that makes me very
happy——”
“Why does it make you happy?”
Her face expressed lack of comprehension—only
about her lips there passed a slight, hardly
noticeable quiver. Confused, he offered, “It is
beautiful to be alive; it has never seemed so
much
so to me before—I wished to ask you?” He
searched in his breast pocket and added, as he
drew out the object, “Has this brooch ever belonged
to you?”
She leaned forward a little toward it, but shook
her head. “No, I can’t remember.
Chronologically
it would, of course, not be impossible, for it
probably did not exist until this
year. Did you
find it in the sun perhaps? The beautiful green
patina surely seems familiar to
me, as if I had
already seen it.”
Involuntarily he repeated, “In the sun?—why
in the sun?”
87
“‘Sole’ it is called here. It brings to light
many things of that sort. Was the brooch said
to have
belonged to a young girl who is said to
have perished, I believe, in the vicinity of the
Forum,
with a companion?”
“Yes, who held his arm about her——”
“Ah, so——”
The two little words apparently lay upon Gradiva’s
tongue as a favourite interjection, and she
stopped after it for a moment before she added,
“Did you think that on that account I might
have worn it? and would that have made you a
little—how did you say it before?—unhappy?”
It was apparent that he felt extraordinarily
relieved and it was audible in his answer, “I am
very
happy about it—for the idea that the brooch
belonged to you made me—dizzy.”
“You seem to have a tendency for that. Did
you perhaps forget to eat breakfast this morning?
That easily aggravates such attacks; I do not
suffer from them, but I make provision, as it
suits
me best to be here at noon. If I can help
you out of your unfortunate condition a little by
sharing my lunch with you——”
She drew out of her pocket a piece of white
bread wrapped in tissue paper, broke it, put half
into his hand, and began to devour the other with
apparent appetite. Thereby her exceptionally
dainty and perfect teeth not only gleamed between
her lips with pearly glitter, but in biting
the
crust caused also a crunching sound so that
they gave the impression of being not unreal
phantoms, but of actual, substantial reality.
Besides, with her conjecture about the postponed
breakfast, she had, to be sure, hit upon the right
thing; mechanically he, too, ate, and felt from it
88
a decidedly favourable effect on the clearing of
his thoughts. So, for a little while, the couple
did not speak further, but devoted themselves
silently to the same practical occupation until
Gradiva said, “It seems to me as if we had already
eaten our bread thus together once two
thousand
years ago. Can’t you remember it?”
He could not, but it seemed strange to him now
that she spoke of so infinitely remote a past, for
the strengthening of his mind by the nourishment
had brought with it a change in his brain. The
idea that she had been going around here in
Pompeii such a long time ago would no longer
harmonize with sound reason; everything about
her seemed of the present, as if it could be
scarcely
more than twenty years old. The form and colour
of her face, the especially charming,
brown, wavy
hair, and the flawless teeth; also, the idea that
the bright dress, marred by no
shadow of a spot,
had lain countless years in the pumice ashes contained
something in the
highest degree inconsistent.
Norbert was seized by a feeling of doubt
whether he were really
sitting here awake or were
not more probably dreaming in his study, where,
in contemplation of
the likeness of Gradiva, he
had been overcome by sleep, and had dreamed
that he had gone to
Pompeii, had met her as a
person still living, and was dreaming further that
he was still sitting
so at her side in the Casa di
Meleagro. For that she was really still alive
or had been living
again could only have happened
in a dream—the laws of nature raised an
objection to it——
89
To be sure, it was strange that she had just
said that she had once shared her bread with him
in
that way two thousand years ago. Of that he
knew nothing, and even in the dream could find
nothing about it.
Her left hand lay with the slender fingers calmly
on her knees. They bore the key to the
solution
of an inscrutable riddle——
Even in the dining-room of the Casa di Meleagro
the boldness of the common house-fly was
not
deterred; on the yellow pillar opposite him he saw
one running up and down in a worthless
way in
greedy quest; now it whizzed right past his nose.
He, however, had to make some answer to her
question, if he did not remember the bread that
he had formerly consumed with her, and he said
suddenly, “Were the flies then as devilish as
now, so that they tormented you to death?”
She glanced at him with utterly incomprehending
astonishment and repeated, “The flies?
Have
you flies on your mind now?”
Then suddenly the black monster sat upon her
hand, which did not reveal by the slightest
quiver
that she noticed it. Thereupon, however, there
united in the young archæologist two
powerful
impulses to execute the same deed. His hand
went up suddenly and clapped with no
gentle
stroke on the fly and the hand of his neighbour.
With this blow there came to him, for the first
time, sense, consternation and also a joyous fear.
He had delivered the stroke not through empty
air, but on an undoubtedly real, living and
warm,
human hand which, for a moment apparently
absolutely startled, remained motionless
90
under his.
Yet then she drew it away with a jerk, and the
mouth above it said, “You are surely
apparently
crazy, Norbert Hanold.”
The name, which he had disclosed to no one in
Pompeii, passed so easily, assuredly and clearly
from her lips that its owner jumped up from the
steps, even more terrified. At the same time
there
sounded in the colonnade footsteps of people who
had come near unobserved; before his
confused
eyes appeared the faces of the congenial pair of
lovers from the Casa del Fauno, and
the young lady
cried, with a tone of greatest surprise, “Zoë! You
here, too? and also on your
honeymoon? You
have not written me a word about it, you know.”

Norbert was again outside before Meleager’s

house in the Strada di Mercurio. How he had
come there was not clear to him, it must have
happened instinctively, and, caused by a
lightning-like
illumination in him, was the only thing that
he could do not to present a
thoroughly ridiculous
figure to the young couple, even more to the girl
greeted so pleasantly by
them, who had just
addressed him by his Christian and family names,
and most of all to
himself. For even if he grasped
nothing, one fact was indisputable. Gradiva, with
a warm,
human hand, not unsubstantial, but
possessing corporeal reality, had expressed an
indubitable
truth; his mind had, in the last two
days, been in a condition of absolute madness;
and not at all
in a silly dream, but rather with the
use of eyes and ears such as is given by nature
to man for
91
reasonable service. Like everything
else, how such a thing had happened escaped his

understanding, and only darkly did he feel that

there must have also been in the game a sixth
sense which, obtaining the upper hand in some
way, had transformed something perhaps
precious
to the opposite. In order to get at least a little
more light on the matter by an attempt at
meditation,
a remote place in solitary silence was absolutely
required; at first, however, he was
impelled
to withdraw as quickly as possible from the sphere
of eyes, ears and other senses,
which use their
natural functions as suits their own purpose.
As for the owner of that warm hand, she had,
at any rate, from her first expression, been
surprised
by the unforeseen and unexpected visit at
noon in the Casa di Meleagro in a not
entirely
pleasant manner. Yet, of this, in the next instant,
there was no trace to be seen in her
bright countenance;
she stood up quickly, stepped toward
the young lady and said, extending
her hand,
“It certainly is pleasant, Gisa; chance sometimes
has a clever idea too. So this is your
husband
of two weeks? I am glad to see him, and, from
the appearance of both of you, I
apparently need
not change my congratulations for condolence.
Couples to whom that would
be applied are at
this time usually sitting at lunch in Pompeii; you
are probably staying near the
‘ingresso’; I shall
look you up there this afternoon. No, I have not
written you anything; you
won’t be offended at
me for that, for you see my hand, unlike yours,
is not adorned by a ring.
The atmosphere here
has an extremely powerful effect on the imagination,
which I can see in
92
you; it is better, of course, than
if it made one too matter-of-fact. The young
man who just went
out is labouring also under a remarkable delusion; it seems to me that he believes a fly is
buzzing in his head; well, everyone has, of course, some kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my
duty, I have some knowledge of entomology and can, therefore, be of a little service in such
cases. My father and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too, had a sudden and pleasing idea of bringing me
here with him if I would be responsible for my own entertainment, and make no demands upon
him. I said to myself that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of course I
had not reckoned at all on the find which I made—I mean the good fortune of meeting you,
Gisa; but I am talking away the time, as is usually the case with an old friend—— My father
comes in out of the sun at two o’clock to eat at the ‘Sole’; so I have to keep company there with
his appetite and, therefore, I am sorry to say, must for the moment forego your society. You
will, of course, be able to view the Casa di Meleagro without me; that I think likely, though I
can’t understand it, of course. Favorisca, signor! Arrivederci, Gisetta! That much Italian I have
already learned, and one really does not need more. Whatever else is necessary one can invent
—please, no, senza
complimenti!”
This last entreaty of the speaker concerned a
polite movement by which the young husband had
seemed to wish to escort her. She had expressed
herself most vividly, naturally and in a manner
quite fitting to the circumstances of the unexpected
meeting of a close friend, yet with
93
extraordinary
celerity, which testified to the urgency of the
declaration that she could not at
present remain
longer. So not more than a few minutes had
passed since the hasty exit of
Norbert Hanold,
when she also stepped from the house of Meleager
into the Strada di
Mercurio. This lay, because
of the hour, enlivened only here and there by a
cringing lizard, and
for a few moments the girl,
hesitating, apparently gave herself over to a brief
meditation. Then
she quickly struck out in the
shortest way to the gate of Hercules, at the intersection
of the
Vicolo di Mercurio and the Strada
di Sallustio, crossed the stepping-stones with the
gracefully
buoyant Gradiva-walk, and thus arrived
very quickly at the two ruins of the side wall
near the
Porta Ercolanese. Behind this there
stretched at some length the Street of Tombs, yet
not
dazzlingly white, nor overhung with glittering
sunbeams, as twenty-four hours ago, when the
young archæologist had thus gazed down over it
with searching eyes. To-day the sun seemed to
be overcome by a feeling that she had done a little
too much good in the morning; she held a
grey
veil drawn before her, the condensation of which
was visibly being increased, and, as a
result, the
cypresses, which grew here and there in the Strada
di Sepolcri, rose unusually sharp
and black against
the heavens. It was a picture different from that
of yesterday; the brilliance
which mysteriously
glittered over everything was lacking; the street
also assumed a certain
gloomy distinctness, and
had at present a dead aspect which honoured its
name. This
impression was not diminished by an
isolated movement at its end, but was rather
heightened
94
by it; there, in the vicinity of the
Villa of Diomede, a phantom seemed to be looking
for its
grave, and disappeared under one of the
monuments.
It was not the shortest way from the house of
Meleager to the “Albergo del Sole,” rather the
exactly opposite direction, but Zoë-Gradiva must
have also decided that time was not yet
importuning
so violently to lunch, for after a quite brief stop
at the Hercules Gate, she walked
farther along the
lava-blocks of the Street of Tombs, every time
raising the sole of her lingering
foot almost perpendicularly.

The Villa of Diomede—named thus, for people

of the present, after a monument which a
certain
freed-man, Marcus Arrius Diomedes, formerly promoted
to the directorship of this city-
section, had
erected near by for his lady, Arria, as well as for
himself and his relatives—was a
very extensive
building and concealed within itself a part of the
history of the destruction of
Pompeii not invented
by imagination. A confusion of extensive ruins
formed the upper part;
below lay an unusually
large sunken garden surrounded by a well-preserved
portico of pillars
with scanty remnants of a fountain
and a small temple in the middle; and farther
along two
stairways led down to a circular cellar-vault,
lighted only dimly by gloomy twilight.
The ashes
of Vesuvius had penetrated into this
also, and the skeletons of eighteen women and
children
had been found here; seeking protection
they had fled, with some hastily gathered provisions,
95
into the half-subterranean space, and the
deceptive refuge had become the tomb of all. In
another place the supposed, nameless master of
the house lay, also stretched out choked on the
ground; he had wished to escape through the
locked garden-door, for he held the key to it in his
fingers. Beside him cowered another skeleton,
probably that of a servant, who was carrying a
considerable number of gold and silver coins. The
bodies of the unfortunates had been
preserved by
the hardened ashes; in the museum at Naples
there is under glass, the exact
impression of the
neck, shoulders and beautiful bosom of a young
girl clad in a fine, gauzy
garment.
The Villa of Diomede had, at one time, at least,
been the inevitable goal of every dutiful
Pompeii
visitor, but now, at noon, in its rather roomy
solitude, certainly no curiosity lingered in
it, and
therefore it had seemed to Norbert Hanold the
place of refuge best suited to his newest
mental
needs. These longed most insistently for grave-like
loneliness, breathless silence, and
quiescent
peace; against the latter, however, an impelling
restlessness in his system raised
counter-claims,
and he had been obliged to force an agreement
between the two demands, such
that the mind tried
to claim its own and yet gave the feet liberty to
follow their impulse. So he
had been wandering
around through the portico since his entrance; he
succeeded thus in
preserving his bodily equilibrium,
and he busied himself with changing his
mental state into the
same normal condition; that,
however, seemed more difficult in execution than
in intention; of
96
course it seemed to his judgment
unquestionable that he had been utterly foolish
and irrational
to believe that he had sat with a
young Pompeiian girl, who had become more or
less
corporeally alive again, and this clear view
of his madness formed incontestably an essential
advance on the return to sound reason; but it was
not yet restored entirely to normal condition,
for,
even if it had occurred to him that Gradiva was
only a dead bas-relief, it was also equally
beyond
doubt that she was still alive. For that irrefutable
proof was adduced; not he alone, but
others also, saw her, knew that her name was Zoë
and spoke with her, as with a being as much
alive,
in substance, as they. On the other hand, however,
she knew his name too, and again, that
could
originate only from a supernatural power; this
dual nature remained enigmatic even for
the rays
of understanding that were entering his mind.
Yet to this incompatible duality there
was joined
a similar one in him, for he cherished the earnest
desire to have been destroyed here
in the Villa of
Diomede two thousand years ago, in order that
he might not run the risk of
meeting Zoë-Gradiva
again anywhere; at the same time, however, an
extraordinary joyous
feeling was stirring within
him, because he was still alive and was therefore
able to meet her
again somewhere. To use a
commonplace yet fitting simile, this was turning in
his head like a
mill-wheel, and through the long
portico he ran around likewise without stopping,
which did
not aid him in the explanation of the
contradictions. On the contrary, he was moved
by an
indefinite feeling that everything was growing
darker and darker about and within him.
97
Then he suddenly recoiled, as he turned one of
the four corners of the colonnade. A half-dozen
paces away from him there sat, rather high up on
a fragmentary wall-ruin, one of the young
girls
who had found death here in the ashes.
No, that was nonsense, which his reason rejected.
His eyes, too, and a nameless something else
recognized that fact. It was Gradiva; she was
sitting on a stone ruin as she had formerly sat
on
the step, only, as the former was considerably
higher, her slender feet, which hung down free in
the sand-colour shoes, were visible up to her dainty
ankles.
With an instinctive movement, Norbert was at
first about to run out between the pillars through
the garden; what, for a half-hour, he had feared
most of anything in the world had suddenly
appeared, viewed him with bright eyes and with
lips which, he felt, were about to burst into
mocking
laughter; yet they didn’t, but the familiar
voice rang out calmly from them, “You’ll
get wet
outside.”
Now, for the first time, he saw that it was raining;
for that reason it had become so dark. That
unquestionably was an advantage to all the plants
about and in Pompeii, but that a human being
in
the place would be benefited by it was ridiculous,
and for the moment Norbert Hanold
feared, far
more than danger of death, appearing ridiculous.
Therefore he involuntarily gave up
the attempt
to get away, stood there, helpless, and looked at
the two feet, which now, as if
somewhat impatient,
were swinging back and forth; and as this view
did not have so clearing
98
an effect upon his thoughts
that he could find expression for them, the owner
of the dainty feet
again took up the conversation.
“We were interrupted before; you were just
going to tell me
something about flies—I imagined
that you were making scientific investigations here—or
about a fly in your head. Did you succeed in
catching and destroying the one on my hand?”
This last she said with a smiling expression
about her lips, which, however, was so faint and
charming that it was not at all terrifying. On
the contrary, it now lent to the questioned man
power of speech, but with this limitation, that the
young archæologist suddenly did not know
how
to address her. In order to escape this dilemma,
he found it best to avoid that and replied,
“I was—as
they say—somewhat confused mentally and
ask pardon that I—the hand—in that
way—how I
could be so stupid, I can’t understand—but I can’t
understand either how its
owner could use my
name in upbraiding me for my—my madness.”
Gradiva’s feet stopped moving and she rejoined,
still addressing him familiarly, “Your power
of
understanding has not yet progressed that far,
Norbert Hanold. Of course, I cannot be
surprised,
for you have long ago accustomed me to it. To
make that discovery again I should
not have needed
to come to Pompeii, and you could have confirmed
it for me a good hundred
miles nearer.”
“A hundred miles nearer”—he repeated, perplexed
and half stuttering—“where is that?”
“Diagonally across from your house, in the
corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a
canary.”
Like a memory from far away this last word
moved the hearer, who repeated, “A canary”—and
he added, stuttering more—“He—he sings?”
99
“They usually do, especially in spring when the
sun begins to seem warm again. In that house
lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of
zoology.”
Norbert Hanold’s eyes opened to a width never
before attained by them, and then he said,
“Bertgang—then
are you—are you—Miss Zoë Bertgang?
But she looked quite different——”
The two dangling feet began again to swing a
little, and Miss Zoë Bertgang said in reply, “If
you find that form of address more suitable between
us, I can use it too, you know, but the
other came
to me more naturally. I don’t know whether I
looked different when we used to run
about before
with each other as friends every day, and occasionally
beat and cuffed each other,
for a change,
but if, in recent years, you had favoured me with
even one glance, you might
perhaps have seen that
I have looked like this for a long time.—No, now,
as they say, it’s
pouring pitchforks; you won’t
have a dry stitch.”
Not only had the feet of the speaker indicated
a return of impatience, or whatever it might be,
but also in the tones of her voice there appeared
a little didactic, ill-humoured curtness, and
Norbert
had thereby been overwhelmed by a feeling that he
was running the risk of slipping
into the rôle of
a big school-boy scolded and slapped in the face.
That caused him to again seek
mechanically for
an exit between the pillars, and to the movement
which showed this impulse
Miss Zoë’s last utterance,
indifferently added, had reference; and, of
course, in an undeniably
100
striking way, because
for what was now occurring outside of the shelter,
“pouring” was really a
mild term. A tropical
cloudburst such as only seldom took pity on the
summer thirst of the
meadows of the Campagna,
was shooting vertically and rushing as if the
Tyrrhenian Sea were
pouring from heaven upon
the Villa of Diomede, and yet it continued like a
firm wall
composed of billions of drops gleaming
like pearls and large as nuts. That, indeed, made
escape
out into the open air impossible, and forced
Norbert Hanold to remain in the school-room of
the
portico while the young school-mistress with
the delicate, clever face made use of the
hindrance
for further extension of her pedagogical discussion
by continuing, after a brief pause:
—
“Then up to the time when people call us
‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had really
acquired a remarkable attachment for you and
thought that I could never find a more pleasing
friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I
had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm in
alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people
(I count girls such) must surely have
something
with which they can occupy their thoughts and
the like. Then you were that
something, but when
archæology overcame you, I made the discovery
that you—excuse the
familiarity, but your new
formality sounds absurd to me—I was saying that
I imagined that you
had become an intolerable
person, who had no longer, at least for me, an eye
in his head, a
tongue in his mouth, nor any of the
memories that I retained of our childhood friendship.
So I
probably looked different from what I
did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at
a
101
party, even last winter, you did not look at me
and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course,
there was nothing which marked me out especially,
for you treated all the others in the same
way.
To you I was but air, and you, with your shock
of light hair, which I had formerly pulled
so often,
were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed
cockatoo and at the same time as
grandiose as an—archæopteryx;
I believe the excavated, antediluvian
bird-monster is so called;
but that your
head harboured an imagination so magnificent as
here in Pompeii to consider me
something excavated
and restored to life—I had not surmised that of
you, and when you
suddenly stood before me
unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to
understand what kind
of incredible fancy your
imagination had invented. Then I was amused,
and, in spite of its
madness, it was not entirely
displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected
it of you.”
With that, her expression and tone somewhat
mollified at the end, Miss Zoë Bertgang finished
her unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture,
and it was indeed notable how exactly she then
resembled the figure of Gradiva on the bas-relief,
not only in her features, her form, her eyes,
expressive
of wisdom, and her charmingly wavy
hair, but also in her graceful manner of
walking
which he had often seen; her drapery, too, dress
and scarf of a cream-coloured, fine
cashmere
material which fell in soft, voluminous folds,
completed the extraordinary
resemblance of her
whole appearance. There might have been much
foolishness in the belief
102
that a young Pompeiian
girl, destroyed two thousand years ago by Vesuvius,
could sometimes
walk around alive again, speak, draw and eat bread, but even if the belief brought happiness, it
assumed everywhere, in the bargain, a considerable amount of incomprehensibility; and in
consideration of all the circumstances, there was incontestably present, in the judgment of
Norbert Hanold, some mitigating ground for his
madness in for two days considering Gradiva a
resurrection.
Although he stood there dry under the portico
roof, there was established, not quite ineptly, a
comparison between him and a wet poodle, who
has had a bucketful of water thrown on his
head;
but the cold shower-bath had really done him
good. Without knowing exactly why, he
felt that
he was breathing much more easily. In that, of
course, the change of tone at the end of
the sermon—for
the speaker sat as if in a pulpit-chair—might
have helped especially; at least
thereat a transfigured
light appeared in his eyes, such as awakened
hope for salvation through
faith produces in the
eyes of an ardently affected church-attendant; and
as the rebuke was now
over, and there seemed no
necessity for fearing a further continuation, he
succeeded in saying,
“Yes, now I recognize—no,
you have not changed at all—it is you, Zoë—my
good, happy,
clever comrade—it is most strange——”
“That a person must die to become alive again;
but for archæologists that is of course
necessary.”
“No, I mean your name——”
“Why is it strange?”
The young archæologist showed himself familiar
with not only the classical languages, but also
103
with
the etymology of German, and continued,
“Because Bertgang has the same meaning as
Gradiva
and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking.’”
Miss Zoë Bertgang’s two sandal-like shoes were,
for the moment, because of their movement,
reminiscent of an impatiently see-sawing wagtail
waiting for something; yet the possessor of
the
feet which walked so magnificently seemed not at
present to be paying any attention to
philological
explanations; by her countenance she gave the
impression of being occupied with
some hasty
plan, but was restrained from it by an exclamation
of Norbert Hanold’s which
audibly emanated from
deepest conviction, “What luck, though, that you
are not Gradiva, but
are like the congenial young
lady!”
That caused an expression as of interested
surprise to pass over her face, and she asked,
“Who
is that? Whom do you mean?”
“The one who spoke to you in Meleager’s
house.”
“Do you know her?”
“Yes, I had already seen her. She was the first
person who seemed especially congenial to me.”
“So? Where did you see her?”
“This morning, in the House of the Faun.
There the couple were doing something very
strange.”
“What were they doing?”
“They did not see me and they kissed each
other.”
“That was really very reasonable, you know.
Why else are they in Pompeii on their wedding
trip?”
104
At one blow with the last word the former
picture changed before Norbert Hanold’s eyes, for
the old wall-ruin lay there empty, because the
girl, who had chosen it as a seat, teacher’s chair
and pulpit, had come down, or really flown, and
with the same supple buoyancy as that of a
wagtail
swinging through the air, so that she already
stood again on Gradiva-feet, before his
glance had
consciously caught up with her descent; and continuing
her speech directly, she
said, “Well, the
rain has stopped; too severe rulers do not reign
long. That is reasonable, too,
you know, and thus
everything has again become reasonable. I, not
least of all, and you can
look up Gisa Hartleben,
or whatever new name she has, to be of scientific
assistance to her
about the purpose of her stay in
Pompeii. I must now go to the ‘Albergo del Sole,’
for my
father is probably waiting for me already
at lunch. Perhaps we shall meet again sometime at
a
party in Germany or on the moon. Addio!”
Zoë Bertgang said this in the absolutely polite,
but also equally indifferent tone of a most well-
bred
young lady, and, as was her custom, placing
her left foot forward, raised the sole of the
right
almost perpendicularly to pass out. As she lifted
her dress slightly with her left hand,
because of
the thoroughly wet ground outside, the resemblance
to Gradiva was perfect and the
man, standing
hardly more than two arm-lengths away, noticed
for the first time a quite
insignificant deviation
in the living picture from the stone one. The
latter lacked something
possessed by the former,
which appeared at the moment quite clear, a
little dimple in her cheek,
105
which produced a slight,
indefinable effect. It puckered and wrinkled a
little and could
therefore express annoyance or
a suppressed impulse to laugh, possibly both together.
Norbert
Hanold looked at it and although
from the evidence just presented to him he had
completely
regained his reason, his eyes had to
again submit to an optical illusion. For, in a tone
triumphing peculiarly over his discovery, he cried
out, “There is the fly again!”
It sounded so strange that from the incomprehending
listener, who could not see herself,
escaped
the question, “The fly—where?”
“There on your cheek!” and immediately the
man, as he answered, suddenly twined an arm
about her neck and snapped, this time with his
lips, at the insect so deeply abhorrent to him,
which vision juggled before his eyes deceptively
in the little dimple. Apparently, however,
without
success, for right afterwards he cried again,
“No, now it’s on your lips!” and thereupon,
quick
as a flash, he directed thither his attempt to capture,
now remaining so long that no doubt
could
survive that he succeeded in completely accomplishing
his purpose, and strange to relate
the
living Gradiva did not hinder him at all, and when
her mouth, after about a minute, was
forced to
struggle for breath, restored to powers of speech,
she did not say, “You are really
crazy, Norbert
Hanold,” but rather allowed a most charming
smile to play more visibly than
before about her
red lips; she had been convinced more than ever
of the complete recovery of
his reason.
The Villa of Diomede had two thousand years
ago seen and heard horrible things in an evil
106
hour,
yet at the present it heard and saw, for about an
hour, only things not at all suited to
inspire horror.
Then, however, a sensible idea became uppermost
in Miss Zoë Bertgang’s mind
and as a result, she
said, against her wishes, “Now, I must really go,
or my poor father will
starve. It seems to me
you can to-day forego Gisa Hartleben’s company
at noon, for you have
nothing more to learn from
her and ought to be content with us in the ‘Sun
Hotel.’”
From this it was to be concluded that daring
that hour something must have been discussed,
for
it indicated a helpful desire to instruct, which
the young lady vented on Norbert. Yet, from
the
reminding words, he did not gather this, but
something which, for the first time, he was
becoming
terribly conscious of; this was apparent in the
repetition, “Your father—what will he
——?”
Miss Zoë, however, interrupted, without any
sign of awakened anxiety, “Probably he will do
nothing; I am not an indispensable piece in his
zoological collection; if I were, my heart would
probably not have clung to you so unwisely.
Besides, from my early years, I have been sure
that a woman is of use in the world only when
she relieves a man of the trouble of deciding
household
matters; I generally do this for my father,
and therefore you can also be rather at ease
about
your future. Should he, however, by chance, in
this case, have an opinion different from
mine,
we will make it as simple as possible. You go
over to Capri for a couple of days; there,
with a
grass snare—you can practise making them on
my little finger—catch a lizard
107
Faraglionensis.
Let it go here again, and catch it before his eyes.
Then give him free choice
between it and me,
and you will have me so surely that I am sorry
for you. Toward his
colleague, Eimer, however,
I feel to-day that I have formerly been ungrateful,
for without his
genial invention of lizard-catching
I should probably not have come into Meleager’s
house, and
that would have been a shame, not only
for you, but for me too.”
This last view she expressed outside of the Villa
of Diomede and, alas, there was no person
present
on earth who could make any statements about
the voice and manner of talking of
Gradiva. Yet
even if they had resembled those of Zoë Bertgang,
as everything else about her
did, they must have
possessed a quite unusually beautiful and roguish
charm.
By this, at least, Norbert Hanold was so strongly
overwhelmed that, exalted to poetic flights, he
cried
out, “Zoë, you dear life and lovely present—we
shall take our wedding-trip to Italy and
Pompeii.”
That was a decided proof of how different circumstances
can also produce a transformation in
a
human being and at the same time unite with
it a weakening of the memory. For it did not
occur to him at all that he would thereby expose
himself and his companion on the journey to
the
danger of receiving, from misanthropic, ill-humoured
railway companions, the names
Augustus and
Gretchen, but at the moment he was thinking so
little about it that they walked
along hand in
hand through the old Street of Tombs in Pompeii.
Of course this, too, did not
stamp itself into their
minds at present as such, for a cloudless sky
shone and laughed again
108
above it; the sun stretched
out a golden carpet on the old lava-blocks; Vesuvius
spread its misty
pine-cone; and the whole
excavated city seemed overwhelmed, not with
pumice and ashes, but
with pearls and diamonds,
by the beneficent rain-storm.
The brilliance in the eyes of the young daughter
of the zoologist rivalled these, but to the
announced
desire about the destination of their
journey by her childhood friend who had, in a
way, also been excavated from the ashes, her wise
lips responded: “I think we won’t worry
about
that to-day; that is a thing which may better be
left by both of us to more and maturer
consideration
and future promptings. I, at least, do not
yet feel quite alive enough now for such
geographical
decisions.”
That showed that the speaker possessed great
modesty about the quality of her insight into
things about which she had never thought until
to-day. They had arrived again at the Hercules
Gate, where, at the beginning of the Strada Consolare,
old stepping-stones crossed the street.
Norbert Hanold stopped before them and said
with a peculiar tone, “Please go ahead here.” A
merry, comprehending, laughing expression lurked
around his companion’s mouth, and, raising
her
dress slightly with her left hand, Gradiva rediviva
Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him with
dreamily
observing eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant
walk, through the sunlight, over the
stepping-stones,
to the other side of the street.

109
PART II

DELUSION AND DREAM

IN

WILHELM JENSEN’S GRADIVA

BY

DR. SIGMUND FREUD

111
DELUSION AND DREAM

I
In a circle of men who take it for granted that
the basic riddle of the dream has been solved
by
the efforts of the present writer,[1] curiosity was
aroused one day concerning those dreams
which
have never been dreamed, those created by authors,
and attributed to fictitious characters
in their
productions. The proposal to submit this kind of
dream to investigation might appear
idle and
strange; but from one view-point it could be
considered justifiable. It is, to be sure, not
at all
generally believed that the dreamer dreams something
senseful and significant. Science
and the
majority of educated people smile when one offers
them the task of interpreting
dreams. Only people
still clinging to superstition, who give continuity,
thereby, to the
convictions of the ancients, will not
refrain from interpreting dreams, and the writer of
Traumdeutung has dared, against the protests of
orthodox science, to take sides with the
ancients
and superstitious. He is, of course, far from accepting
in dreams a prevision of the
112
future, for the disclosure
of which man has, from time immemorial,
striven vainly. He could
not, however, completely
reject the connections of dreams with the future,
for, after completing
some arduous analysis, the
dreams seemed to him to represent the fulfilment of
a wish of the
dreamer; and who could dispute that
wishes are preponderantly concerned with the future?
I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish.
Whoever is not afraid to toil through a
difficult
book, whoever does not demand that a complicated
problem be insincerely and
untruthfully presented
to him as easy and simple, to save his own effort,
may seek in the above-
mentioned Traumdeutung
ample proof of this statement, and may, until then,
cast aside the
objection that will surely be expressed
against the equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment.
We have, however, anticipated. The question is
not now one of establishing whether the
meaning
of a dream is, in every case, to be interpreted as the
fulfilment of a wish, or, just as
frequently, as an
anxious expectation, an intention or deliberation,
etc. The first question is,
rather, whether the
dream has any meaning at all, whether one should
grant it the value of a
psychic process. Science
answers, No; it explains the dream as a purely
physiological process,
behind which one need not
seek meaning, significance nor intention. Physical
excitations play,
during sleep, on the psychic instrument
and bring into consciousness sometimes
some,
sometimes other ideas devoid of psychic
coherence. Dreams are comparable only to
convulsions,
not to expressive movements.
113
In this dispute over the estimation of dreams,
writers seem to stand on the same side with the

ancients, superstitious people and the author of

Traumdeutung. For, when they cause the people
created by their imagination to dream, they follow
the common experience that people’s
thoughts and
feelings continue into sleep, and they seek only to
depict the psychic states of
their heroes through
the dreams of the latter. Story-tellers are valuable
allies, and their
testimony is to be rated high, for
they usually know many things between heaven
and earth that
our academic wisdom does not even
dream of. In psychic knowledge, indeed, they are
far
ahead of us ordinary people, because they draw
from sources that we have not yet made
accessible
for science. Would that this partizanship of
literary workers for the senseful nature
of dreams
were only more unequivocal! Sharper criticism
might object that writers take sides
neither for nor
against the psychic significance of an isolated
dream; they are satisfied to show
how the sleeping
psyche stirs under the stimuli which have remained
active in it as off-shoots
of waking life.
Our interest for the way in which story-tellers make use of dreams is not, however, made less
intense
by this disillusionment. Even if the investigation
should teach nothing of the nature of
dreams,
it may perhaps afford us, from this angle, a little
insight into the nature of creative
literary production.
Actual dreams are considered to be unrestrained
and irregular formations,
and now come the
free copies of such dreams; but there is much less
freedom and arbitrariness
in psychic life than we
are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all. What
we, laity, call chance
114
resolves itself, to an acknowledged
degree, into laws; also, what we call
arbitrariness in psychic
life rests on laws only now
dimly surmised. Let us see!
There are two possible methods for this investigation;
one is engrossment with a special case,
with the dream-creations of one writer in one of
his works; the other consists in bringing
together
and comparing all the examples of the use of
dreams which are found in the works of
different
story-tellers. The second way seems to be by far
the more effective, perhaps the only
justifiable one,
for it frees us immediately from the dangers connected
with the conception of
“the writer” as an
artistic unity. This unity falls to pieces in investigations
of widely different
writers, among whom
we are wont to honour some, individually, as the
most profound
connoisseurs of psychic life. Yet
these pages will be filled by an investigation of
the former
kind. It so happened, in the group
of men who started the idea, that some one remembered
that
the bit of fiction which he had
most recently enjoyed contained several dreams
which looked at
him with familiar expression and
invited him to try on them the method of Traumdeutung.
He
admitted that the material and setting
of the little tale had been partly responsible for
the origin
of his pleasure, for the story was unfolded
in Pompeii, and concerned a young archæologist
who had given up interest in life, for that
in the remains of the classic past, and now, by
a
remarkable but absolutely correct détour, was
brought back to life. During the perusal of this
really poetic material, the reader experienced all
sorts of feelings of familiarity and
115
concurrence.
The tale was Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, a little
romance designated by its author
himself “A
Pompeian Fancy.”
In order that my further references may be to
familiar material, I must now ask my readers to
lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some
time with Gradiva, which first appeared in the
book
world in 1903. To those who have already read
Gradiva, I will recall the content of the
story in a
short epitome, and hope that their memory will of
itself restore all the charm of which
the story is
thereby stripped.
A young archæologist, Norbert Hanold, has discovered
at Rome, in a collection of antiques, a
bas-relief
which attracts him so exceptionally that he
is delighted to be able to get an excellent
plaster-cast
of it which he can hang up in his study in a
German university-city and study with
interest.
The relief represents a mature young girl walking.
She has gathered up her voluminous
gown slightly,
so that her sandalled feet become visible. One foot
rests wholly on the ground;
the other is raised to
follow and touches the ground only with the tips of
the toes while sole and
heel rise almost perpendicularly.
The unusual and especially charming walk
represented had
probably aroused the artist’s
attention, and now, after so many centuries,
captivates the eye of
our archæological observer.
This interest of the hero in the described bas-relief
is the basic psychological fact of our story.
It is not immediately explicable. “Doctor Norbert
Hanold, docent of archæology, really found
in
the relief nothing noteworthy for his science.”
(Gradiva, p. 14.) “He could not explain what
116
quality in it had aroused his attention; he knew
only that he had been attracted by something
and
this effect of the first view had remained unchanged
since then,” but his imagination does
not
cease to be occupied with the relief. He finds in
it a “sense of present time,” as if the artist
had
fixed the picture on the street “from life.” He
confers upon the girl represented walking a
name,
Gradiva, “the girl splendid in walking,” spins a
yarn that she is the daughter of a
distinguished
family, perhaps of a “patrician ædile, whose office
was connected with the
worship of Ceres,” and is
on the way to the temple of the goddess. Then it
is repulsive to him to
place her in the mob of a
metropolis; rather he convinces himself that she
is to be transported to
Pompeii, and is walking
there somewhere on the peculiar stepping-stones
which have been
excavated; these made a dry
crossing possible in rainy weather, and yet also
afforded passage
for chariot-wheels. The cut of
her features seems to him Greek, her Hellenic
ancestry
unquestionable. All of his science of
antiquity gradually puts itself at the service of this
or other
fancies connected with the relief.
Then, however, there obtrudes itself upon him
a would-be scientific problem which demands
solution.
Now it is a matter of his passing a critical
judgment “whether the artist had
reproduced
Gradiva’s manner of walking from life.” He
cannot produce it in himself; in the
search for
the “real existence” of this gait, he arrives only
at “observation from life for the
purpose of enlightenment
on the matter” (G. p. 18). This
forces him, to be sure, to a mode of
action utterly
foreign to him. “Women had formerly been for
him only a conception in marble 117

or bronze, and
he had never given his feminine contemporaries
the least consideration.” Society
life has always
seemed to him an unavoidable torture; young
ladies whom he meets, in such
connections, he fails
to see and hear, to such a degree that, on the next
encounter, he passes
without greeting, which, of
course, serves to place him in an unfavourable light
with them.
Now, however, the scientific task
which he has imposed upon himself forces him in
dry
weather, but especially in wet weather, to
observe diligently the feet of ladies and girls on
the
street, an activity which yields him many a
displeased and many an encouraging glance from
those observed. “Yet one was as incomprehensible
to him as the other.” (G. p. 19.) As a result
of
these careful studies, he finds that Gradiva’s gait
cannot be proved to exist really, a fact
which fills
him with regret and annoyance.
Soon afterwards he has a terribly frightful
dream, which transports him to old Pompeii on
the
day of the eruption of Vesuvius, and makes
him an eye-witness of the destruction of the city.
“As he stood thus at the edge of the Forum near
the Jupiter temple, he suddenly saw Gradiva a
short distance in front of him. Until then no
thought of her presence there had moved him, but
now suddenly it seemed natural to him, as she was,
of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was
living in
her native city and, without his having any suspicion
of it, was his contemporary.” (G.
p. 20.) Fear
about her impending fate draws from him a cry
of warning, in answer to which the
118
unperturbed
apparition turns her face toward him.
Unconcerned, she continues her way to the
portico of the
temple, sits down there on a step and slowly rests
her head upon it, while her face
keeps growing
paler, as if it were turning to white marble. As he
hastens after her, he finds her,
with calm countenance,
stretched out, as if sleeping, on the broad
step; soon the rain of ashes
buries her form.
When he awakes, he thinks he is still hearing
the confused cries of the Pompeiians, who are
seeking safety, and the dully resounding boom of
the turbulent sea; but even after his returning
senses have recognized these noises as the waking
expressions of life in the noisy metropolis,
he retains
for some time the belief in the reality of what he
has dreamed; when he has finally
rid himself of
the idea that he was really present, nearly two
thousand years ago, at the
destruction of Pompeii,
there yet remains to him, as a firm conviction,
the idea that Gradiva
lived in Pompeii and was
buried there in the year 79. His fancies about
Gradiva, due to the
after-effects of this dream,
continue so that he now, for the first time, begins
to mourn her as
lost.
While he leans from his window, prepossessed
with these ideas, a canary, warbling his song in
a cage at an open window of the house opposite,
attracts his attention. Suddenly something like
a
thrill passes through the man not yet completely
awakened from his dream. He believes that
he
sees, in the street, a figure like that of his Gradiva,
and even recognizes the gait
characteristic of her;
without deliberation he hastens to the street to
overtake her, and the
119
laughter and jeers of the
people, at his unconventional morning attire, first
drive him quickly
back home. In his room, it is
again the singing canary in the cage who occupies
him and
stimulates him to a comparison with himself.
He, too, is sitting in a cage, he finds, yet it
is
easier for him to leave his cage. As if from added
after-effect of the dream, perhaps also under
the
influence of the mild spring air, he decides to take
a spring trip to Italy, for which a
scientific motive
is soon found, even if “the impulse for travel had
originated in a nameless
feeling” (G. p. 28).
We will stop a moment at this most loosely
motivated journey and take a closer look at the
personality, as well as the activities of our hero.
He seems to us still incomprehensible and
foolish;
we have no idea of how his special folly is to acquire
enough human appeal to compel
our interest. It
is the privilege of the author of Gradiva to leave
us in such a quandary; with his
beauty of diction
and his judicious selection of incident, he presently
rewards our confidence
and the undeserved sympathy
which we still grant to his hero. Of the
latter we learn that he is
already destined by
family tradition to be an antiquarian, has later,
in isolation and
independence, submerged himself
completely in his science, and has withdrawn
entirely from
life and its pleasures. Marble and
bronze are, for his feelings, the only things really
alive and
expressing the purpose and value of
human life. Yet, perhaps with kind intent, Nature
has put
into his blood a thoroughly unscientific
sort of corrective, a most lively imagination, which
can
impress itself not only on his dreams, but also
on his waking life. By such separation of
120
imagination
and intellectual capacity, he is destined to be
a poet or a neurotic, and he belongs
to that race of
beings whose realm is not of this world. So it
happens that his interest is fixed
upon a bas-relief
which represents a girl walking in an unusual
manner, that he spins a web of
fancies about it,
invents a name and an ancestry for it, and transports
the person created by him
into Pompeii,
which was buried more than eighteen hundred years
ago. Finally, after a
remarkable anxiety-dream
he intensifies the fancy of the existence and destruction
of the girl
named Gradiva into a delusion
which comes to influence his acts. These performances
of
imagination would appear to us strange and
inscrutable, if we should encounter them in a really
living person. As our hero, Norbert Hanold, is a
creature of an author, we should like to ask the
latter timidly if his fancy has been determined by
any power other than his own arbitrariness.
We left our hero just as he is apparently being
moved by the song of a canary to take a trip to
Italy, the motive for which is apparently not clear
to him. We learn, further, that neither
destination
nor purpose are firmly established in his
mind. An inner restlessness and
dissatisfaction
drive him from Rome to Naples and farther on
from there; he encounters the
swarm of honeymoon
travellers, and, forced to notice the tender
“Augustuses” and
“Gretchens,” is utterly unable
to understand the acts and impulses of the couples.
He arrives at
the conclusion that, of all the follies
of humanity, “marriage, at any rate, took the
prize as the
greatest and most incomprehensible
one, and the senseless wedding trips to Italy
somehow
121
capped the climax of this buffoonery.”
(G. p. 30.) At Rome, disturbed in his sleep by the
proximity of a loving couple, he flees, forthwith,
to Naples, only to find there another
“Augustus”
and “Gretchen.” As he believes that he understands
from their conversation that the
majority
of those bird-couples does not intend to nest in the
rubbish of Pompeii, but to take
flight to Capri, he
decides to do what they do not do, and finds himself
in Pompeii, “contrary to
expectations and intentions,”
a few days after the beginning of his
journey—without, however,
finding there the peace
which he seeks.
The rôle which, until then, has been played by
the honeymoon couples, who made him uneasy
and vexed his senses, is now assumed by house-flies,
in which he is inclined to see the
incarnation
of absolute evil and worthlessness. The two tormentors
blend into one; many fly-
couples remind
him of honeymoon travellers, address each other
probably, in their language,
also as “My only
Augustus” and “My sweet Gretchen.”
Finally he cannot help admitting “that his dissatisfaction
was certainly caused not by his
surroundings
alone, but to a degree found its origin
in him.” (G. p. 40.) He feels that he is out
of
sorts because he lacks something without being
able to explain what.
The next morning he goes through the “ingresso”
to Pompeii and, after taking leave of the
guide, roams aimlessly through the city, notably,
however, without remembering that he has
been
present in a dream some time before at the destruction
of Pompeii. Therefore in the “hot,
122
holy”
hour of noon, which the ancients, you know,
considered the ghost-hour, when the other
visitors
have taken flight and the heap of ruins, desolate
and steeped in sunlight, lies before
him, there stirs
in him the ability to transport himself back into
the buried life, but not with the
aid of science.
“What it taught was a lifeless, archæological view
and what came from its
mouth was a dead, philological
language. These helped in no way to a
comprehension with
soul, mind and heart, as the
saying is, but he, who possessed a desire for that,
had to stand
alone here, the only living person in
the hot noonday silence, among the remains of
the past, in
order not to see with physical eyes
nor hear with corporeal ears. Then—the dead
awoke, and
Pompeii began to live again.” (G. p. 48.) While thus, by means of his imagination, he endows
the past with life, he suddenly sees, indubitably, the Gradiva of his bas-relief step out of a
house and buoyantly cross the lava stepping-stones, just as he had seen her in the dream that
night when she had lain down to sleep on the steps of the Apollo temple. “With this memory he
became conscious, for the first time, of something else; he had, without himself knowing the
motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account, and had, without stop, continued from Rome
and Naples to Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for,
with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a foot-print different from all the
others.” (G. p. 50.)
The suspense, in which the author of Gradiva
has kept us up to this point, mounts here, for a
123
moment, to painful confusion. Not only because
our hero has apparently lost his equilibrium,
but
also because, confronted with the appearance of
Gradiva, who was formerly a plaster-cast
and then
a creation of imagination, we are lost. Is it a
hallucination of our deluded hero, a
“real” ghost,
or a corporeal person? Not that we need to believe
in ghosts to draw up this list.
Jensen, who named
his tale a “Fancy,” has, of course, found no occasion,
as yet, to explain to
us whether he wishes
to leave us in our world, decried as dull and ruled
by the laws of science,
or to conduct us into another
fantastic one, in which reality is ascribed to ghosts
and spirits. As
Hamlet and Macbeth show, we are
ready to follow him into such a place without hesitation.
The delusion of the imaginative archæologist
would need, in that case, to be measured by
another standard. Yes, when we consider how
improbable must be the real existence of a
person
who faithfully reproduces in her appearance that
antique bas-relief, our list shrinks to an
alternative:
hallucination or ghost of the noon hour. A
slight touch in the description eliminates
the former
possibility. A large lizard lies stretched out,
motionless, in the sunlight; it flees,
however,
before the approaching foot of Gradiva and wriggles
away over the lava pavement.
So, no hallucination;
something outside of the mind of our
dreamer. But ought the reality of a
rediviva to
be able to disturb a lizard?
Before the house of Meleager Gradiva disappears.
We are not surprised that Norbert Hanold
persists
in his delusion that Pompeii has begun to live again
about him in the noon hour of
124
spirits, and that
Gradiva has also returned to life and gone into
the house where she lived before
the fateful August
day of the year 79. There dart through his mind
keen conjectures about the
personality of the owner,
after whom the house may have been named,
and about Gradiva’s
relation to the latter; these
show that his science has now given itself over
completely to the
service of his imagination.
After entering this house, he again suddenly discovers
the
apparition, sitting on low steps between
two yellow pillars. “Spread out on her knees lay
something white, which he was unable to distinguish
clearly; it seemed to be a papyrus sheet”
(G. p. 55). Taking for granted his most recent
suppositions about her ancestry, he speaks to her
in Greek, awaiting timorously the determination
of whether the power of speech may, perhaps,
be
granted to her in her phantom existence. As she
does not answer, he changes the greeting to
Latin.
Then, from smiling lips, come the words, “If you
wish to speak with me, you must do so
in German.”
What embarrassment for us, the readers! Thus
the author of Gradiva has made sport of us and
decoyed us, as if by means of the refulgence of
Pompeiian sunshine, into a little delusion so
that
we may be milder in our judgment of the poor
man, whom the real noonday sun actually
burns;
but we know now, after recovering from brief
confusion, that Gradiva is a living
German girl, a
fact which we wish to reject as utterly improbable.
Reflecting calmly, we now
await a discovery of
what connection exists between the girl and the
stone representation of
her, and of how our young
archæologist acquired the fancies which hint at her
real personality.
125
Our hero is not freed so quickly as we from the
delusion, for, “Even if the belief brought
happiness,”
says our author, “it assumed everywhere,
in the bargain, a considerable amount of
incomprehensibility.”
(G. p. 102.) Besides, this delusion
probably has subjective roots of which
we
know nothing, which do not exist for us. He
doubtless needs trenchant treatment to bring
him
back to reality. For the present he can do nothing
but adapt the delusion to the wonderful
discovery
which he has just made. Gradiva, who had
perished at the destruction of Pompeii,
can be
nothing but a ghost of the noon hour, who returns
to life for the noon hour of spirits; but
why,
after the answer given in German, does the exclamation
escape him: “I knew that your
voice
sounded like that”? Not only we, but the girl,
too, must ask, and Hanold must admit that
he has
never heard her voice before, but expected to hear
it in the dream, when he called to her,
as she lay
down to sleep on the steps of the temple. He
begs her to repeat that action, but she
then rises,
directs a strange glance at him, and, after a few
steps, disappears between the pillars
of the court.
A beautiful butterfly had, shortly before that,
fluttered about her a few times; in his
interpretation
it had been a messenger from Hades, who was
to admonish the departed one to
return, as the
noon hour of spirits had passed. The call, “Are
you coming here again to-morrow
in the noon
hour?” Hanold can send after the disappearing
girl. To us, however, who venture a
more sober
interpretation, it will seem that the young lady
found something improper in the
126
request which
Hanold had made of her, and therefore, insulted,
left him, as she could yet know
nothing of his
dream. May not her delicacy of feeling have
realized the erotic nature of the
request, which was
prompted, for Hanold, only by the connection
with his dream?
After the disappearance of Gradiva, our hero
examines all the guests at the “Hotel Diomed”
table
and soon also those of “Hotel Suisse,” and can then
assure himself that in neither of the
only two
lodgings known to him in Pompeii is a person to
be found who possesses the most
remote resemblance
to Gradiva. Of course he had rejected, as
unreasonable, the supposition
that he might really
meet Gradiva in one of the two hostelries. The
wine pressed on the hot soil
of Vesuvius then helps
to increase the day’s dizziness.
The only certainty about the next day is that
Norbert must again be in Meleager’s house at
noon; and, awaiting the hour, he enters Pompeii
over the old city-wall, a way which is against
the
rules. An asphodel cluster of white bell-flowers
seems, as flower of the lower world,
significant
enough for him to pluck and carry away. All his
knowledge of antiquity appears to
him, however,
while he is waiting, as the most purposeless and
indifferent matter in the world,
for another interest
has acquired control of him, the problem,
“what is the nature of the physical
manifestation
of a being like Gradiva, dead and alive at the
same time, although the latter was
true only in
the noon hour of spirits?” (G. p. 64.) He is
also worried lest to-day he may not meet
127
the lady
sought, because perhaps she may not be allowed
to return for a long time, and when he
again sees
her between the pillars, he considers her appearance
an illusion, which draws from
him the grieved
exclamation, “Oh, that you were still alive!”
This time, however, he has
evidently been too
critical, for the apparition possesses a voice which
asks him whether he
wishes to bring her the white
flower, and draws the man, who has again lost his
composure,
into a long conversation. Our author
informs us, readers, to whom Gradiva has already
become
interesting as a living personality, that the
ill-humoured and repellent glance of the day before
has given way to an expression of searching inquisitiveness
or curiosity. She really sounds him,
demands, in explanation of his remark of the preceding
day, when he had stood near her as she
lay
down to sleep, in this way learns of the dream in
which she perished with her native city,
then of
the bas-relief, and of the position of the foot,
which attracted the young archæologist.
Now
she shows herself ready to demonstrate her manner
of walking, whereby the substitution
of light, sand-coloured,
fine leather shoes for the sandals, which
she explains as adaptation to
the present, is established
as the only deviation from the original relief
of Gradiva. Apparently
she is entering into his
delusion, whose whole range she elicits from him,
without once
opposing him. Only once she seems
to have been wrested from her rôle by a peculiar
feeling
when, his mind on the bas-relief, he asserts
that he has recognized her at first glance. As, at
this
stage of the conversation, she, as yet, knows
nothing of the relief, she must be on the point of
128
misunderstanding Hanold’s words, but she has
immediately recovered herself again, and only
to
us will many of her speeches appear to have a
double meaning, besides their significance in
connection
with the delusion, a real, present meaning,
as, for example, when she regrets that he
did not
succeed in confirming the Gradiva-gait on the
street. “What a shame; perhaps you
would not
have needed to take the long journey here.” (G.
p. 69.) She learns also that he has
named the bas-relief
of her “Gradiva,” and tells him that her real
name is Zoë!
“The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds
to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means
‘life.’”
“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,”
she responds. “And I have long accustomed
myself
to being dead.”
With the promise to be at the same place again
on the morrow, she takes leave of him, after she
has obtained the asphodel cluster. “To those who
are more fortunate one gives roses in spring,
but
for me the flower of oblivion is the right one from
your hand.” (G. p. 70.) Melancholy is
suited to
one so long dead, who has now returned to life for
a few short hours.
We begin now to understand and to hope. If
the young lady, in whose form Gradiva is again
revived, accepts Hanold’s delusion so completely,
she does it probably to free him from it. No
other course is open; by opposition, one would
destroy that possibility. Even the serious
treatment
of a real condition of this kind could proceed
no differently than to place itself first
on the ground
story of the delusion-structure, and investigate
it then as thoroughly as possible.
129
If Zoë is the
right person, we shall soon learn how one cures
delusions like those of our hero.
We should also
like to know how such a delusion originates. It
would be very striking, and yet
not without example
and parallel, if the treatment and investigation of
the delusion should
coincide and, while it is being
analysed, result in the explanation of its origin.
We have a
suspicion, of course, that our case might
then turn out to be an “ordinary” love story,
but one
may not scorn love as a healing power for
delusions; and was not our hero’s captivation by
the
Gradiva-relief also a complete infatuation,
directed, to be sure, at the past and lifeless?
After Gradiva’s disappearance, there is heard
once more a distant sound like the merry note of
a bird flying over the city of ruins. The man who
has remained behind picks up something
white,
which Gradiva has left, not a papyrus leaf, but a
sketch-book with pencil drawings of
Pompeii. We
should say that the fact that she has forgotten the
little book, in this place, is a
pledge of her return,
for we assert that one forgets nothing without a
secret reason or a hidden
motive.
The remainder of the day brings to our hero
all sorts of remarkable discoveries and facts, which
he neglects to fit together. In the wall of the
portico where Gradiva disappeared, he notices
to-
day a narrow cleft, which is, however, wide
enough to afford passage to an unusually slender
figure. He recognizes the fact that Zoë-Gradiva
does not need to sink into the ground here, an
idea which is so senseless that he is now ashamed
of the discarded belief, but that she uses this
130
route
to go back to her tomb. A faint shadow seems to
him to dissolve at the end of the Street
of Tombs,
before the so-called Villa of Diomede. Dizzy, as
on the previous day, and occupied
with the same
problem, he wanders now about Pompeii, wondering
of what physical nature
Zoë-Gradiva may be
and whether one might feel anything if one touched
her hand. A peculiar
impulse urges him to undertake
this experiment, and yet an equally great
timidity in connection
with the idea restrains him.
On a hot, sunny slope he meets an older man who,
from his
equipment, must be a zoologist or a
botanist, and seems to be busy catching things.
The latter
turns to him and says: “Are you interested
in Faraglionensis? I should hardly have
supposed it,
but it seems thoroughly probable that
they are found, not only in the Faraglioni of Capri,
but
also dwell permanently on the mainland. The
method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is
really good; I have already used it often with
the best of success. Please remain quite still.”
(G.
p. 74.) The speaker stops talking then, and
holds a little snare, made of a long grass-blade,
before a narrow crevice, from which the blue,
chatoyant, little head of a lizard peeps. Hanold
leaves the lizard-hunter with the critical thought
that it is hardly credible what foolishly
remarkable
purposes can cause people to make the long trip to
Pompeii, in which criticism he
does not, of course,
include himself and his intention of seeking foot-prints
of Gradiva in the
ashes of Pompeii. The
gentleman’s face, moreover, seems familiar to him,
as if he has noticed
it casually in one of the two
hotels; the man’s manner of addressing him has
also sounded as if
131
directed at an acquaintance. As
he continues his wandering, a side street leads him
to a house
not previously discovered by him; this
proves to be the “Albergo del Sole.” The hotel-keeper,
who is not busy, avails himself of the
opportunity to recommend highly his house and
the
excavated treasures in it. He asserts that he
was present when there were found near the Forum
the young lovers who, on realizing their inevitable
destruction, had clasped each other in firm
embrace
and thus awaited death. Hanold has already
heard of that before, and shrugged his
shoulders
over it, as a fabulous invention of some especially
imaginative narrator, but to-day
the words of the
hotel-keeper awaken in him credulity, which soon
stretches itself more when
the former brings forth
a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which,
in his presence, was
gathered, with the remains
of the girl, from the ashes. He secures this brooch
without further
critical consideration, and when, as
he is leaving the hotel, he sees in an open window,
nodding
down, a cluster of white asphodel blossoms,
the sight of the grave-flower thrills him as an
attestation
of the genuineness of his new possession.
With this brooch, however, a new delusion takes
possession of him or, rather, the old one
continues
for a while, apparently not a good omen for the
treatment which has been started. Not
far from
the Forum a couple of young lovers were excavated
in an embrace, and in the dream
he saw Gradiva
lie down to sleep in that very neighbourhood, at
the Apollo temple. Was it not
possible that in
reality she went still farther from the Forum to
meet there some one with whom
she then died?
132
A tormenting feeling, which we can perhaps
compare to jealousy, originates from this
supposition. He appeases it by referring to the uncertainty of the combination, and so far
regains his senses as to
be able to have his evening meal in “Hotel Diomed.”
His attention is
attracted by two newly arrived
guests, a man and a woman, whom, because of a
certain
resemblance, he considers brother and sister—in
spite of the difference in the colour of their
hair. They are the first people whom he has
encountered on this trip who seem possibly
congenial.
A red Sorrento rose, which the young
girl wears, awakes in him some memory—he
cannot
recall what. Finally he goes to bed and dreams;
it is remarkable nonsense, but
apparently concocted
of the day’s experiences. “Somewhere in
the sun Gradiva sat making a
trap out of a blade
of grass, in order to catch a lizard, and she said,
‘Please stay quite still—my
colleague is right;
the method is really good, and she has used it with
greatest success!’” He
resists the dream, even
in his sleep, with the criticism that it is, of course,
utter madness, and he
succeeds in getting rid of it
with the aid of an invisible bird, who utters a
short, merry call and
carries the lizard away in
his beak.
In spite of all this ghostly visitation, he awakes
rather cleared and settled mentally. A rose-
bush,
which bears flowers of the kind that he noticed
yesterday on the young lady, recalls to
him that
in the night some one said that in the spring one
gave roses. He plucks some of the
roses involuntarily,
and there must be some association with
these which has a liberating effect
133
upon his mind.
Rid of his aversion to human beings, he takes the
customary road to Pompeii,
laden with the roses,
the brooch and the sketch-book, and occupied by
the different problems
relating to Gradiva. The
old delusion has become full of flaws; he already
doubts if she is
permitted to stay in Pompeii in
the noon hour only, and not at other times.
Emphasis, on that
account, is transferred to the
object recently acquired, and the jealousy connected
with it
torments him in all sorts of disguises.
He might almost wish that the apparition should
remain
visible to only his eyes and escape the notice
of others; in that way, he might consider her his
exclusive property. During his ramble awaiting
the noon hour he has a surprising encounter. In
the Casa del Fauno he happens upon two people
who doubtless believe themselves
undiscoverable
in a nook, for they are embracing each other and
their lips meet. With
amazement he recognizes in
them the congenial couple of yesterday evening;
but for brother
and sister their present position,
the embrace and the kiss are of too long duration.
So it is a
couple of lovers, probably a young bridal
couple, another Augustus and Gretchen. Strange
to
relate, the sight of this now arouses in him
nothing but pleasure, and fearful, as if he had
disturbed a secret act of devotion, he withdraws
unobserved. A deference which has long been
lacking in him has been restored.
Arriving at Meleager’s house, he is afraid that
he may find Gradiva in the company of another
man, and becomes so excited about it that he can
find no other greeting for her than the
question:
“Are you alone?” With difficulty she makes
him realize that he has picked the roses
134
for her;
he confesses to her the latest delusion, that she is
the girl who was found in the Forum
in her lover’s
embrace and to whom the green brooch had belonged.
Not without mockery, she
inquires if he
found the piece in the sun. The latter—here called
“Sole”—brings to light many
things of that sort.
As cure for the dizziness which he admits, she
proposes to him to share a
lunch with her and offers
him half of a piece of white bread wrapped in tissue
paper; the other
half of this she consumes with
apparent appetite. Thereat her faultless teeth
gleam between her
lips and, in biting the crust,
cause a slight crunching sound. To her remark,
“It seems to me as if
we had already eaten our
bread thus together once two thousand years ago.
Can’t you
remember it?” (G. p. 88.) he cannot
answer, but the strengthening of his mind by the
nourishment, and all the evidences of present time
in her do not fail to have effect on him.
Reason
stirs in him and makes him doubt the whole delusion
that Gradiva is only a noonday
ghost; on
the other hand, there is the objection that she,
herself, has just said that she had
already shared
her repast with him two thousand years ago. As
a means of settling this conflict
there occurs to
him an experiment which he executes with slyness
and restored courage. Her
left hand, with its
slender fingers, is resting on her knees, and one of
the house-flies, about
whose boldness and worthlessness
he formerly became so indignant, alights
on this hand.
Suddenly Hanold’s hand rises and
claps, with no gentle stroke, on the fly and on
Gradiva’s
135
hand. This bold experiment affords
him twofold success: first the joyous conviction
that he
actually touched a really living, warm hand,
then, however, a reprimand, before which he starts
up in terror from his seat on the step. For from
Gradiva’s lips come the words, after she has
recovered
from her amazement, “You are surely
apparently crazy, Norbert Hanold.”
Calling a person by name is recognized as the
best method of awakening him, when he is
sleeping,
or of awakening a somnambulist. Unfortunately
we are not permitted to observe the
results,
for Norbert Hanold, of Gradiva’s calling his name,
which he had told to no one in
Pompeii. For
at this critical moment, the congenial lovers appear
from the Casa del Fauno and
the young lady calls,
in a tone of pleasant surprise, “Zoë! You here,
too? and also on your
honeymoon? You have
not written me a word about it, you know.”
Before this new proof of the
living reality of
Gradiva, Hanold flees.
Zoë-Gradiva, too, is not most pleasantly surprised
by the unexpected visit which disturbs her,
it
seems, in an important piece of work. Soon
composed, she answers the question with a glib
speech, in which she informs her friend, and
especially us, about the situation; and thereby she
knows how to get rid of the young couple. She
extends her compliments, but she is not on her
wedding-trip. “The young man who just went
out is labouring also under a remarkable
delusion;
it seems to me that he believes a fly is buzzing
in his head; well, every one has, of
course, some
kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my duty, I have
some knowledge of entomology
136
and can, therefore,
be of a little service in such cases. My father
and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too,
had a sudden
and pleasing idea of bringing me here with him
if I would be responsible for my
own entertainment
and make no demands upon him. I said to myself
that I should certainly dig
up something interesting
alone here. Of course I had not reckoned at
all on the find which I
made—I mean the good
fortune of meeting you, Gisa.” (G. p. 92.) Zoë
now feels obliged to
leave at once, to be company
for her father at the “Sole.” So she goes, after
she has introduced
herself to us as the daughter
of the zoologist and lizard-catcher, and has admitted
in ambiguous
words her therapeutic intentions and
other secret ones. The direction which she takes is
not that
of the “Sun Hotel,” in which her father
is awaiting her, but it seems to her, too, that in
the
region of the Villa of Diomede a shadowy form
is seeking its burial-place and disappears under
one
of the monuments; therefore, with foot poised each
time almost perpendicularly, she directs
her steps
to the Street of Tombs. Thither, in shame and
confusion, Hanold has fled, and is
wandering up
and down in the portico of the court without stopping,
occupied with settling the
rest of his problem
by mental efforts. One thing has become unimpeachably
clear to him; that
he was utterly
foolish and irrational to believe that he communed
with a young Pompeiian girl
who had become
more or less physically alive again; and this clear
insight into his madness
forms incontestably an
essential bit of progress in the return to sound
reason. On the other
hand, however, this living
girl, with whom other people also communicate,
as with one of a
137
corporeal reality like theirs, is
Gradiva, and she knows his name; for the solution
of this riddle
his scarcely awakened reason is not
strong enough. Emotionally, also, he is not calm
enough to
be equal to so difficult a task, for he
would most gladly have been buried two thousand
years
ago in the Villa of Diomede, only to be sure
of never meeting Zoë-Gradiva again. A violent
longing to see her struggles meanwhile with the
remnants of the inclination to flee, which has
persisted in him.
Turning at one of the four corners of the colonnade,
he suddenly recoils. On a fragmentary
wall-ruin
there sits one of the girls who met death here
in the Villa of Diomede; but that
attempt to take
refuge again in the realm of madness is soon put
aside; no, it is Gradiva, who
has apparently
come to give him the last bit of her treatment.
She interprets rightly his first
instinctive movement
to flee, as an attempt to leave the place, and points
out to him that he
cannot escape, for outside a
frightful cloudburst is in progress. The merciless
girl begins the
examination with the question
as to what he intended in connection with the fly
on her hand.
He does not find courage to make
use of a definite pronoun, but acquires the more
valuable
kind needed to put the deciding question.
“I was—as they say—somewhat confused mentally
and ask pardon that I—the hand—in that
way—how I could be so stupid, I can’t understand—but
I can’t understand either how its
owner
could use my name in upbraiding me for my—my
madness.” (G. p. 98.)
138
“Your power of understanding has not yet
progressed that far, Norbert Hanold. Of course, I

cannot be surprised, for you have long ago accustomed

me to it. To make that discovery again,
I should not have needed to come to Pompeii,
and you could have confirmed it for me a good
hundred miles nearer.”
“A good hundred miles nearer; diagonally
across from your house, in the corner house; in
my
window, in a cage, is a canary,” she discloses
to the still bewildered man.
This last word touches the hero like a memory
from afar. That is surely the same bird whose
song has suggested to him the trip to Italy.
“In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang,
professor of zoology.”
As his neighbour, therefore, she is acquainted
with him and his name. It seems as if the
disappointment
of a superficial solution is threatening
us—a solution unworthy of our
expectations.
As yet Norbert Hanold shows no regained independence
of thought, when he repeats, “Then
are you—are you Miss Zoë Bertgang? But she
looked quite different——”
Miss Bertgang’s answer shows then that other
relations besides those of neighbourliness have
existed between them. She knows how to intercede
for the familiar manner of address, which
he
has, of course, used to the noonday spirit, but
withdrawn again from the living girl; she
makes
former privileges of use to her here. “If you
find that form of address more suitable
between
us, I can use it too, you know, but the other came
to me more naturally. I don’t know
whether I
looked different when we used to run about before
with each other as friends, every
139
day, and
occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change,
but if, in recent years, you had
favoured me with
even one glance you might perhaps have seen that
I have looked like this for
a long time.”
A childhood friendship had therefore existed
between the two, perhaps a childhood love, from
which the familiar form of address derived its
justification. Isn’t this solution perhaps as
superficial
as the one first supposed? The fact that
it occurs to us that this childhood relation
explains
in an unexpected way so many details of what has
occurred in the present intercourse
between them
makes the matter essentially deeper. Does it not
seem that the blow on Zoë-
Gradiva’s hand which
Norbert Hanold has so splendidly motivated by
the necessity of solving,
experimentally, the question
of the physical existence of the apparition,
is, from another
standpoint, remarkably similar to
a revival of the impulse for “beating and cuffing,”
whose
sway in childhood Zoë’s words have
testified to? And when Gradiva puts to the
archæologist
the question whether it does not
seem to him that they have once already, two
thousand years
ago, shared their luncheon, does
not the incomprehensible question become suddenly
senseful,
when we substitute for the historical
past the personal childhood, whose memories persist
vividly for the girl, but seem to be forgotten
by the young man? Does not the idea suddenly
dawn upon us that the fancies of the young man
about his Gradiva may be an echo of his
childhood
memories? Then they would, therefore, be no
arbitrary products of his imagination,
140
but determined,
without his knowing it, by the existing
material of childhood impressions
already forgotten,
but still active in him. We must be able
to point out in detail the origin of
these fancies,
even if only by conjecture. If, for instance,
Gradiva must be of pure Greek
ancestry, the
daughter of a respected man, perhaps of a priest
of Ceres, that predisposes us
fairly well for an
after-effect of the knowledge of her Greek name—Zoë,
and of her
membership in the family of a
professor of zoology. If, however, these fancies of
Hanold’s are
transformed memories, we may expect
to find in the disclosures of Zoë Bertgang, the
suggestion of the sources of these fancies. Let us
listen; she tells us of an intimate friendship of
childhood; we shall soon learn what further development
this childhood relation had in both.
“Then up to the time when people call us
‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had
really
acquired a remarkable attachment for you,
and thought that I could never find a more pleasing
friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I
had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm
in
alcohol was far more interesting than I, and
people (I count girls such) must surely have
something with which they can occupy their
thoughts and the like. Then you were that
something,
but when archæology overcame you, I
made the discovery that you—excuse the
familiarity,
but your new formality sounds absurd to
me—I was saying that I imagined that you
had
become an intolerable person, who had no longer,
at least for me, an eye in his head, a
tongue in
his mouth, nor any of the memories that I retained
of our childhood friendship. So I
141
probably looked
different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at a
party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course,
there was nothing that marked me out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way.
To you I was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had formerly pulled so
often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as
grandiose as an—archæopteryx; I believe the excavated antediluvian bird-monster is so called;
but that your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me
as something excavated and restored to life—I had not surmised that of you, and when
you
suddenly stood before me unexpectedly, it
cost me some effort at first to understand what
kind
of incredible fancy your imagination had invented.
Then I was amused and, in spite of its
madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me.
For, as I said, I had not expected it of you.”
(G.
p. 101.)
So she thus tells us clearly enough what, with
the years, has become of the childhood
friendship
for both of them. With her it expanded into an
intense love affair, for one must have
something,
you know, to which one, that is, a girl, pins her
affections. Miss Zoë, the
incarnation of cleverness
and clarity, makes her psychic life, too, quite
transparent for us. If it
is already the general
rule for a normal girl that she first turns her
affection to her father, she is
especially ready to
do it, she who has no one but her father in her
family; but this father has
142
nothing left for her;
the objects of science have captured all his interest.
So she has to look
around for another person,
and clings with especial fervour to the playmate
of her youth. When
he, too, no longer has any
eyes for her, it does not destroy her love, rather
augments it, for he
has become like her father,
like him absorbed by science and, by it, isolated
from life and from
Zoë. So it is granted to her
to be faithful in unfaithfulness, to find her father
again in her
beloved, to embrace both with the
same feeling as we may say, to make them both
identical in
her emotions. Where do we get
justification for this little psychological analysis,
which may
easily seem autocratic? In a single,
but intensely characteristic detail the author of
the romance
gives it to us. When Zoë pictures
for us the transformation of the playmate of her
youth, which
seems so sad for her, she insults
him by a comparison with the archæopteryx,
that bird-monster
which belongs to the archæology
of zoology. So she has found a single concrete
expression for
identifying the two people;
her resentment strikes the beloved as well as the
father with the
same word. The archæopteryx is,
so to speak, the compromise, or intermediary
representation
in which the folly of her beloved
coincides with her thought of an analogous folly
of her father.
With the young man, things have taken a different
turn. The science of antiquity overcame
him
and left to him interest only in the women
of bronze and stone. The childhood friendship
died,
143
instead of developing into a passion, and the
memories of it passed into such absolute

forgetfulness that he does not recognize nor pay any

attention to the friend of his youth, when
he meets
her in society. Of course, when we continue our
observations, we may doubt if
“forgetfulness” is
the right psychological term for the fate of these
memories of our
archæologist. There is a kind
of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the
difficulty with
which the memory is awakened,
even by strong objective appeals, as if a subjective
resistance
struggled against the revival.
Such forgetting has received the name “repression”
in
psychopathology; the case which Jensen
has presented to us seems to be an example of
repression. Now we do not know, in general,
whether, in psychic life, forgetting an impression
is connected with the destruction of its memory-trace;
about repression we can assert with
certainty
that it does not coincide with the destruction,
the obliteration, of the memory. The
repressed
material cannot, as a rule, break through,
of itself, as a memory, but remains potent
and
effective. Some day, under external influence, it
causes psychic results which one may
accept as
products of transformation or as remnants of forgotten
memories; and if one does not
view them
as such, they remain incomprehensible. In the
fancies of Norbert Hanold about
Gradiva, we
thought we recognized already the remnants of
the repressed memories of his
childhood friendship
with Zoë Bertgang. Quite legitimately one
may expect such a recurrence
of the repressed
material, if the man’s erotic feelings cling to the
repressed ideas, if his erotic
144
life has been involved
in the repression. Then there is truth in the old
Latin proverb which was
perhaps originally aimed
at expulsion through external influences, not at
inner conflict: “You
may drive out natural
disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will
always return,” but it
does not tell all, announces
only the fact of the recurrence of repressed material,
and does not
describe at all the most remarkable
manner of this recurrence, which is accomplished
as if by
malicious treason; the very thing which
has been chosen as a means of repression—like the
“two-pronged fork” of the proverb—becomes the
carrier of the thing recurring; in and behind
the
agencies of repression the material repressed finally
asserts itself victoriously. A well-
known etching
by Félicien Rops illustrates this fact, which is
generally overlooked and lacks
acceptance, more
impressively than many explanations could; and
he does it in the typical case
of the repression in
the lives of saints and penitents. From the temptations
of the world, an
ascetic monk has sought
refuge in the image of the crucified Saviour. Then,
phantom-like, this
cross sinks and, in its stead,
there rises shining, the image of a voluptuous,
unclad woman, in
the same position of the crucifixion.
Other painters of less psychological insight
have, in such
representations of temptation, depicted
sin as bold and triumphant, near the Saviour
on the
cross. Rops, alone, has allowed it to take
the place of the Saviour on the cross; he seems to
have known that the thing repressed proceeds, at
its recurrence, from the agency of repression
itself.
If Norbert Hanold were a living person, who
had, by means of archæology, driven love and
the
145
memory of his childhood friendship out of
his life, it would now be legitimate and correct
that
an antique relief should awaken in him the
forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his
childhood;
it would be his well-deserved fate to have
fallen in love with the stone
representation of
Gradiva, behind which, by virtue of an unexplained
resemblance, the living
and neglected Zoë
becomes effective.
Miss Zoë, herself, seems to share our conception
of the delusion of the young archæologist, for
the
pleasure which she expresses at the end of her
“unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture”
is
hardly based on anything other than her readiness
to refer his entire interest in Gradiva to her
person.
This is exactly what she does not believe him
capable of, and what, in spite of all the
disguises of
the delusion, she recognizes as such. Her psychic
treatment of him has a beneficent
effect; he feels
himself free, as the delusion is now replaced by
that of which it can be only a
distorted and unsatisfactory
copy. He immediately remembers and
recognizes her as his good,
cheerful, clever comrade
who has not changed essentially; but he finds
something else most
strange—
“That a person must die to become alive again,”
says the girl, “but for archæologists that is of
course necessary.” (G. p. 102.) She has apparently
not yet pardoned him for the détour which
he made from the childhood friendship through
the science of antiquity to this relation which
has recently been established.
“No, I mean your name—Because Bertgang has
the same meaning as Gradiva and signifies
‘the
one splendid in walking.’” (G. p. 102.)
146
Even we are not prepared for that. Our hero
begins to rise from his humility and to play an
active rôle. He is, apparently, entirely cured of
his delusion, lifted far above it, and proves this
by
tearing asunder the last threads of the web of
delusion. Patients, also, who have been freed
from the compulsion of their delusion, by the
disclosure of the repression behind it, always act
in just that way. When they have once understood,
they themselves offer the solutions for the
last and most significant riddles of their strange
condition in suddenly emerging ideas. We had
already believed, of course, that the Greek ancestry
of the mythical Gradiva was an after-effect
of the Greek name, Zoë, but with the name, Gradiva,
we had ventured nothing; we had
supposed it the
free creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination, and
behold! this very name now
shows itself to be
a remnant, really a translation of the repressed
family-name of the
supposedly forgotten beloved
of his youth.
The derivation and solution of the delusion are
now completed. What follows may well serve
as
a harmonious conclusion of the tale. In regard
to the future, it can have only a pleasant effect
on us, if the rehabilitation of the man, who formerly
had to play the lamentable rôle of one
needing to be cured, progresses, and he succeeds
in awakening in the girl some of the emotions
which he formerly experienced. Thus it happens
that he makes her jealous by mentioning the
congenial
young lady, who disturbed them in Meleager’s
house, and by the acknowledgment
147
that the latter
was the first girl who had impressed him much.
When Zoë is then about to take a
cool departure,
with the remark that now everything is reasonable
again, she herself not least of
all, that he might
look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever her name might
now be, and be of
scientific assistance to her about
the purpose of her stay in Pompeii, but she has to
go now to
the “Albergo del Sole” where her father
is already waiting for her at lunch, perhaps they
may
see each other again some time at a party
in Germany or on the moon, he seizes upon the
troublesome fly as a means of taking possession
of her cheek, first, and then of her lips, and
assumes
the aggressive, which is the duty of a man in the
game of love. Only once more does a
shadow
seem to fall on their happiness, when Zoë reminds
him that now she must really go to
her father, who
will otherwise starve in the “Sole.” “Your
father—what will he——?” (G. p.
106.)
But the clever girl knows how to silence the
apprehension quickly. “Probably he will do
nothing; I am not an indispensable piece in his
zoological collection; if I were, my heart would
probably not have clung to you so unwisely.”
Should the father, however, by way of exception,
in this case, have an opinion different from hers,
there is a sure method. Hanold needs only to
go
over to Capri, there catch a lacerta faraglionensis,
for which purpose he may practise the
technique
on her little finger, then set the animal free again
here, catch it before the eyes of the
zoologist and
give him the choice of the faraglionensis on the
mainland or his daughter, a
proposal in which
mockery, as one may easily note, is combined
with bitterness, an admonition
148
to the betrothed,
also, not to follow too closely the model after
which his beloved has chosen
him. Norbert
Hanold sets us at rest on this matter, as he expresses,
by all sorts of apparently
trivial symptoms,
the great transformation which has come
over him. He voices the intention of
taking a
wedding trip with his Zoë to Italy and Pompeii,
as if he had never been indignant at the
newly
married travellers, Augustus and Gretchen. His
feelings towards this happy couple, who
so unnecessarily
travelled more than one hundred miles
from their German home, have entirely
disappeared
from his memory. Certainly the author is right
when he cites such weakening of
memory as the
most valuable mark of a mental change. Zoë
replies to the announced desire
about the destination
of their journey, “by her childhood friend
who had, in a way, also been
excavated from the
ashes,” (G. p. 108), that she does not yet feel quite
alive enough for such
geographical decision.
Beautiful reality has now triumphed over the
delusion. Yet an honour still awaits the latter
before the two leave Pompeii. When they have
arrived at the Hercules Gate, where, at the
beginning
of the Strada Consolare, old stepping-stones
cross the street, Norbert Hanold stops
and asks
the girl to go ahead. She understands him and,
“raising her dress slightly with her left
hand,
Gradiva rediviva Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him
with dreamily observing eyes, crossed
with her
calmly buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over
the stepping-stones.” With the
triumph of eroticism,
what was beautiful and valuable in the delusion
is now acknowledged.
149
With the last comparison of “the childhood
friend excavated from the ashes,” the author of
the
story has, however, put into our hand the key
of the symbolism which the delusion of the hero
made use of in the disguise of the repressed memory.
There is no better analogy for repression,
which
at the same time makes inaccessible and conserves
something psychic, than the burial
which was the
fate of Pompeii, and from which the city was able
to arise again through work
with the spade. Therefore
in his imagination the young archæologist had
to transport to
Pompeii the original figure of the
relief which reminded him of the forgotten beloved
of his
youth. Jensen, however, had a good right
to linger over the significant resemblance which
his
fine sense traced out between a bit of psychic
occurrence in the individual and a single
historical
event in the history of man.

150
II

It was really our intention to investigate with

the aid of definite analytic method only the
two or
three dreams which are found in the tale
Gradiva; how did it happen then that we allowed
ourselves to be carried away with the analysis of
the whole story and the examination of the
psychic processes of the two chief characters?
Well, that was no superfluous work, but a
necessary
preparation. Even when we wish to understand
the real dreams of an actual person,
we must
concern ourselves intensively with the character and
the fortunes of this person, not
only the experiences
shortly before the dream, but also those of the
remote past. I think,
however, that we are not
yet free to turn to our real task, but must still
linger over the piece of
fiction itself, and perform
more preparatory work.
Our readers will, of course, have noticed with
surprise that till now we have considered Norbert
Hanold and Zoë Bertgang in all their psychic
expressions and activities, as if they were real
individuals and not creatures of an author, as if
the mind of their creator were absolutely
transparent,
not a refractory and cloudy medium; and
our procedure must seem all the more
151
surprising
when the author of Gradiva expressly disavows
the portrayal of reality by calling his
tale a
“Fancy.” We find, however, that all his pictures
copy reality so faithfully that we should
not
contradict if Gradiva were called not a “Fancy,” but a study in psychiatry. Only in two
points has Wilhelm Jensen made use of his license, to create suppositions which do not seem to
have roots in the earth of actual law: first, when he has the young archæologist find a genuinely
antique bas-relief which, not only in the detail of the position of the foot in walking, but in all
details, the shape of the face, and the bearing, copies a person living much later, so that he can
consider the physical manifestation of this person to be the cast endowed with life; second,
when
the hero is caused to meet the living girl in Pompeii,
whither his fancy has transported the
dead girl,
while he separates himself, by the journey to
Pompeii, from the living girl, whom he
has noticed
on the street of his home city; this second instance
is no tremendous deviation from
the possibilities
of life; it asks aid only of chance, which undeniably
plays a part in so many
human fates, and, moreover,
makes it reasonable, for this chance reflects
again the destiny
which has decreed that through
flight one is delivered over to the very thing that
one is fleeing
from. More fantastic, and originating
solely in the author’s arbitrariness, seems the first
supposition which brings in its train the detailed
resemblance of the cast to the living girl,
where
moderation might have limited the conformity to
the one trait of the position of the foot
in walking.
One might then have tried to let one’s own
imagination play in order to establish
152
connection
with reality. The name Bertgang might point to
the fact that the women of that
family had been
distinguished, even in ancient times, by the characteristic
of a beautiful gait,
and by heredity the
German Bertgang was connected with those Romans,
a woman of whose
family had caused the ancient
artist to fix in a bas-relief the peculiarity of her
walk. As the
individual variations of human
structure are, however, not independent of one
another, and as
the ancient types, which we come
upon in the collections, are actually always emerging
again
in our midst, it would not be entirely
impossible that a modern Bertgang should repeat
again
the form of her ancient forbear, even in
all the other traits of her physique. Inquiry of
the author
of the story for the sources of this
creation might well be wiser than such speculation;
a good
prospect of solving again a bit of supposed
arbitrariness would probably then appear. As,
however, we have not access to the psychic life
of the author, we leave to him the undiminished
right of building up a thoroughly valid development
on an improbable supposition, a right
which
Shakespeare, for example, has asserted in King
Lear.
Otherwise, we wish to repeat, Wilhelm Jensen has
given us an absolutely correct study in
psychiatry,
in which we may measure our understanding of
psychic life, a story of illness and
cure adapted to
the inculcation of certain fundamental teachings of
medical psychology.
Strange enough that he should
have done this! What if, in reply to questioning,
he should deny
153
this intention? It is so easy to
draw comparisons and to put constructions on
things. Are we not
rather the ones who have
woven secret meanings, which were foreign to him,
into the beautiful
poetic tale? Possibly; we shall
come back to that later. As a preliminary, however,
we have
tried to refrain from interpretations
with that tendency, by reproducing the story, in
almost
every case, from the very words of the
writer; and we have had him furnish text as well
as
commentary, himself. Any one who will compare
our text with that of Gradiva will have to
grant this.
Perhaps in the judgment of the majority we
are doing a poor service for him when we declare
his work a study in psychiatry. An author is to
avoid all contact with psychiatry, we are told,
and leave to physicians the portrayal of morbid
psychic conditions. In reality no true author has
ever heeded this commandment. The portrayal
of the psychic life of human beings is, of course,
his most especial domain; he was always the
precursor of science and of scientific psychology.
The borderline between normal and morbid psychic
conditions is, in a way, a conventional one,
and,
in another way, in such a state of flux that probably
every one of us oversteps it many
times in the
course of a day. On the other hand, psychiatry
would do wrong to wish to limit
itself continually
to the study of those serious and cloudy illnesses
which arise from rude
disturbances of the delicate
psychic apparatus. It has no less interest in the
lesser and adjustable
deviations from the normal
which we cannot yet trace back farther than
disturbances in the play
154
of psychic forces; indeed,
it is by means of these that it can understand
normal conditions, as
well as the manifestations
of serious illness. Thus the author cannot yield
to the psychiatrist nor
the psychiatrist to the
author, and the poetic treatment of a theme from
psychiatry may result
correctly without damage to
beauty.
The imaginative representation of the story of
illness and its treatment, which we can survey
better after finishing the story and relieving our
own suspense, is really correct. Now we wish
to
reproduce it with the technical expressions of our
science, in doing which it will not be
necessary to
repeat what has already been related.
Norbert Hanold’s condition is called a “delusion”
often enough by the author of the story, and
we
also have no reason to reject this designation.
We can mention two chief characteristics of
“delusion,” by which it is not, of course, exhaustively
described, but is admittedly
differentiated
from other disturbances. It belongs first to that
group of illnesses which do not
directly affect the
physical, but express themselves only by psychic
signs, and it is
distinguished secondly by the
fact that “fancies” have assumed control, that is,
are believed and
have acquired influence on actions.
If we recall the journey to Pompeii to seek in the
ashes the
peculiarly-formed foot-prints of Gradiva,
we have in it a splendid example of an act under
the
sway of the delusion. The psychiatrist would
perhaps assign Norbert Hanold’s delusion to the
great group of paranoia and designate it as a
“fetichistic erotomania,” because falling in love
with the bas-relief would be the most striking
thing to him and because, to his conception,
155
which
coarsens everything, the interest of the young
archæologist in the feet and foot-position
of women
must seem suspiciously like fetichism. All such
names and divisions of the different
kinds of
delusion are, however, substantially useless and
awkward.[2]
The old-school psychiatrist would, moreover,
stamp our hero as a dégénéré, because he is a
person capable, on account of such strange predilections,
of developing a delusion, and would
investigate the heredity which has unrelentingly
driven him to such a fate. In this, however,
Jensen does not follow him; with good reason, he
brings us nearer to the hero to facilitate for us
æsthetic sympathy with him; with the diagnosis
“dégénéré,” whether or not it may be justifiable
to
us scientifically, the young archæologist is at once
moved farther from us, for we, readers,
are, of
course, normal people and the measure of humanity.
The essential facts of heredity and
constitution in
connection with this condition also concern the
author of Gradiva little; instead,
he is engrossed
in the personal, psychic state which can give rise
to such a delusion.
In an important point, Norbert Hanold acts
quite differently from ordinary people. He has no
interest in the living woman; science, which he
serves, has taken this interest from him and
transferred it to women of stone or bronze. Let us
not consider this an unimportant peculiarity;
it is
really the basis of the story, for one day it happens
that a single such bas-relief claims for
156
itself all
the interest which would otherwise belong only to
the living woman, and thereby
originates the
delusion. Before our eyes there is then unfolded
the story of how this delusion is
cured by a
fortunate set of circumstances, the interest transferred
back again from the cast to
the living girl.
The author of the story does not allow us to trace
the influences because of
which our hero begins to
avoid women; he only suggests to us that such
conduct is not
explained by his predisposition
which is invested with a rather fanciful—we might
add, erotic
—need. We learn later also that in his
childhood he did not avoid other children; he was
then
friendly with the little girl, was inseparable
from her, shared with her his lunches, cuffed her,
and was pulled around by her. In such attachment,
such a combination of tenderness and
aggression, is expressed the incomplete eroticism of
child life, which expresses its activities
first spitefully
and then irresistibly and which, during
childhood, only physicians and writers
usually
recognize as eroticism. Our author gives us to
understand clearly that he has those
intentions,
for he suddenly causes to awaken in his hero,
with suitable motive, a lively interest
in the gait
and foot-position of women, an interest which, in
science, as well as among the
ladies of his home-city,
must bring him into disrepute as a foot-fetichist,
and is to us, however,
necessarily derived
from the memory of his childhood playmate. The
girl, to be sure, was
characterized, as a child, by
the beautiful walk with her foot almost perpendicular
as she
157
stepped out, and through the
portrayal of this very gait an antique bas-relief
later acquired for
Norbert Hanold great significance.
Let us add, moreover, immediately, that the
author of
Gradiva stands in complete agreement
with science in regard to the derivation of the
remarkable manifestation of fetichism. Since the
investigations by Binet we really try to trace
fetichism back to erotic impressions of childhood.
The condition of continued avoidance of women
gives the personal qualification, as we say, the
disposition
for the formation of a delusion; the
development of psychic disturbance begins at
the moment when a chance impression awakens the
forgotten childhood experiences which are
emphasized
in an erotic way that is at least traceable.
Awakened is really not the right term,
however,
when we consider the further results. We must
reproduce our author’s correct
representation in
a mode of expression artistically correct, and
psychological. On seeing the
relief Norbert Hanold
does not remember that he has seen such a foot-position
in the friend of
his youth; he certainly
does not remember and yet every effect of the
relief proceeds from such
connection with the
impression of his childhood. The childhood-impression,
stirred, becomes
active, so that it begins
to show activity, though it does not appear
in consciousness, but
remains “unconscious,” a
term which we now use unavoidably in psychopathology.
This term
“unconscious” we should
now like to see withdrawn from all the conflicts
of philosophers and
natural philosophers, which
have only etymological significance. For psychic
processes which
158
are active and yet at the same
time do not come through into the consciousness
of the person
referred to, we have at present no
better name and we mean nothing else by “unconsciousness.”
If many thinkers wish to dispute as
unreasonable the existence of such an unconscious,
we
think they have never busied themselves with
analogous psychic phenomena, and are under the
spell of the common idea that everything psychic
which is active and intensive becomes,
thereby, at
the same time, conscious, and they have still to
learn what our author knows very
well, that there
are, of course, psychic processes, which, in spite of
the fact that they are
intensive and show energetic
activities, remain far removed from consciousness.
We said once that the memories of the childhood
relations with Zoë are in a state of
“repression”
with Norbert Hanold; and we have called them
“unconscious memories.” Here we
must, of course,
turn our attention to the relation between the two
technical terms which seem
to coincide in meaning.
It is not hard to clear this up. “Unconscious” is
the broader term,
“repressed” the narrower.
Everything that is repressed is unconscious; but
we cannot assert that
everything unconscious is
repressed. If Hanold, at the sight of the relief,
had remembered his
Zoë’s manner of walking, then
a formerly unconscious memory would have become
immediately active and conscious, and thus would
have shown that it was not formerly
repressed.
“Unconscious” is a purely descriptive term, in
many respects indefinite and, so to
speak, static;
“repressed” is a dynamic expression which takes
into consideration the play of
psychic forces and
the fact that there is present an effort to express
all psychic activities, among
159
them that of becoming
conscious again, but also a counterforce, a resistance,
which might
hinder a part of these psychic activities,
among these, also, getting into consciousness. The
mark of the repressed material is that, in spite of
its intensity, it cannot break through into
consciousness.
In Hanold’s case, therefore, it was a
matter, at the appearance of the bas-relief
on his
horizon, of a repressed unconscious, in short of a
repression.
The memories of his childhood association with
the girl who walks beautifully are repressed in
Norbert Hanold, but this is not yet the correct view
of the psychological situation. We remain
on the
surface so long as we treat only of memories and
ideas. The only valuable things in
psychic life
are, rather, the emotions. All psychic powers are
significant only through their
fitness to awaken
emotions. Ideas are repressed only because they
are connected with
liberations of emotions, which
are not to come to light; it would be more correct
to say that
repression deals with the emotions, but
these are comprehensible to us only in connection
with
ideas. Thus, in Norbert Hanold, the erotic
feelings are repressed, and, as his eroticism neither
knows nor has known another object than Zoë
Bertgang of his youth, the memories of her are
forgotten. The antique bas-relief awakens the
slumbering eroticism in him and makes the
childhood
memories active. On account of a resistance
in him to the eroticism, these memories
can become
active only as unconscious. What now happens in
him is a struggle between the
power of eroticism
and the forces that are repressing it; the result
of this struggle is a delusion.
160
Our author has omitted to give the motive
whence originates the repression of the erotic life
in
his hero; the latter’s interest in science is, of
course, only the means of which the repression
makes use; the physician would have to probe
deeper here, perhaps in this case without finding
the foundation. Probably, however, the author
of Gradiva, as we have admiringly emphasized,
has not hesitated to represent to us how the
awakening of the repressed eroticism results from
the very sphere of the means which are serving the
repression. It is rightly an antique, the bas-
relief
of a woman, through which our archæologist is
snatched and admonished out of his
alienation
from love to pay the debt with which we are
charged by our birth.
The first manifestations of the process now stimulated by the bas-relief are fancies which play
with the person represented by it. The model appears to him to be something “of the present,”
in the best sense, as if the artist had fixed the girl walking on the street from life. The name,
Gradiva, which he forms from the epithet of the war-god advancing to battle, Mars Gradivus,
he lends to the ancient girl; with more and more definitions he endows her with a personality.
She
may be the daughter of an esteemed man, perhaps
of a patrician, who is associated with the
temple
service of a divinity; he believes that he reads
Greek ancestry in her features, and finally
this
forces him to transport her far from the confusion
of a metropolis to more peaceful
Pompeii, where
he has her walking over the lava stepping-stones
which make possible the
161
crossing of the street.
These feats of fancy seem arbitrary enough and
yet again harmlessly
unsuspicious. Even when
from them is produced, for the first time, the
impulse to act, when the
archæologist, oppressed
by the problem whether such foot-position corresponds
to reality,
begins observations from life,
in looking at the feet of contemporary women and
girls, this act
covers itself by conscious, scientific
motives, as if all the interest in the bas-relief of
Gradiva
had originated in his professional interest
in archæology. The women and girls on the
street,
whom he uses as objects for his investigation,
must, of course, assume a different, coarsely
erotic
conception of his conduct, and we must admit that
they are right. For us, there is no
doubt that
Hanold knows as little about his motives as about
the origin of his fancies
concerning Gradiva. These
latter are, as we shall learn later, echoes of his
memories of the
beloved of his youth, remnants of
these memories, transformations and disfigurements
of them,
after they have failed to push into
consciousness in unchanged form. The so-called
æsthetic
judgment that the relief represents “something
of the present” is substituted for the
knowledge
that such a gait belongs to a girl known
to him and crossing streets in the present; behind
the
impression “from life” and the fancy about
her Greek traits, is hidden the memory of her
name,
Zoë, which, in Greek, means life; Gradiva
is, as the man finally cured of the delusion tells us,
a
good translation of her family-name, Bertgang,
which means splendid or magnificent in
walking;
the decisions about her father arise from the knowledge
that Zoë Bertgang is the
162
daughter of an
esteemed university instructor, which is probably
translated into the antique as
temple service.
Finally his imagination transports her to Pompeii
not “because her calm, quiet
manner seems to
require it,” but because, in his science, there is
found no other nor better
analogy to the remarkable
condition in which he has traced out, by vague
reconnoitring, his
memories of his childhood friendship.
If he once covered up what was so close
to him, his own
childhood, with the classic past,
then the burial of Pompeii, this disappearance,
with the
preservation of the past, offers a striking
resemblance to the repression of which he has
knowledge by means of so-called “endopsychic”
perceptions. The same symbolism, therefore,
which
the author has the girl use consciously at the end
of the tale, is working in him.
“I said to myself that I should certainly dig
up something interesting alone here. Of course,
I
had not reckoned at all on the find which I
made.” (G. p. 92.) At the end (G. p. 108),
the girl
answers to the announced desire about
the destination of their journey, “by her childhood
friend
who had, in a way, also been excavated
from the ashes.”
Thus we find at the very beginning of the
performances of Hanold’s fancies and actions, a
twofold determination, a derivation from two
different sources. One determination is the one
which appears to Hanold, himself; the other, the
one which discloses itself to us upon re-
examination
of his psychic processes. One, the conscious one,
is related to the person of
163
Hanold; the other is
the one entirely unconscious to him. One originates
entirely from the series
of associations connected
with archæological science; the other, however,
proceeds from the
repressed memories which have
become active in him, and the emotional impulses
attached to
them. The one seems superficial, and
covers up the other, which masks itself behind
the former.
One might say that the scientific
motivation serves the unconscious eroticism as
cloak, and that
science has placed itself completely
at the service of the delusion, but one may not
forget,
either, that the unconscious determination
can effect nothing but what is at the time satisfactory
to the scientific conscious. The symptoms
of delusion—fancies as well as acts—are results of
a
compromise between two psychic streams, and in
a compromise the demands of each of the
two
parties are considered; each party has been obliged
to forego something that he wished to
carry out.
Where a compromise has been established, there
was a struggle, here the conflict
assumed by us
between the suppressed eroticism and the forces
which keep it alive in the
repression. In the
formation of a delusion this struggle is never
ended.
Attack and resistance are renewed after every
compromise-formation, which is, so to speak,
never
fully satisfactory. This our author also knows
and therefore he causes a feeling of
discontent, a
peculiar restlessness, to dominate his hero in this
phase of the disturbance, as
preliminary to and
guarantee of further developments.
These significant peculiarities of the twofold
determination for fancies and decisions, of the
164
formation of conscious pretexts for actions, for
the motivation of which the repressed has given
the greater contribution, will, in the further progress
of the story, occur to us oftener, and
perhaps
more clearly; and this rightfully, for in this
Jensen has grasped and represented the
never-failing,
chief characteristic of the morbid psychic
processes. The development of Norbert
Hanold’s
delusion progresses in a dream, which, caused by
no new event, seems to proceed
entirely from his
psychic life, which is occupied by a conflict. Yet
let us stop before we
proceed to test whether the
author of Gradiva, in the formation of his dreams,
meets our
expectation of a deeper understanding.
Let us first ask what psychiatry has to say about
his
ideas of the origin of a delusion, how it stands
on the matter of the rôle of repression and the
unconscious, of conflict and compromise-formation.
Briefly, can our author’s representation of
the
genesis of a delusion stand before the judgment of
science?
And here we must give the perhaps unexpected
answer that, unfortunately, matters are here
actually
just reversed; science does not stand before the
accomplishment of our author.
Between the essential
facts of heredity and constitution, and the
seemingly complete creations
of delusion, there
yawns a breach which we find filled up by the
writer of Gradiva. Science
does not yet recognize
the significance of repression nor the fact that it
needs the unconscious
for explanation to the
world of psychopathological phenomena; it does
not seek the basis of
delusion in psychic conflict,
and does not regard its symptoms as a compromise-formation.
165
Then our author stands alone against
all science? No, not that—if the present writer
may
reckon his own works as science. For he,
himself, has for some years interceded—and until
recently almost alone[3]—for the views which he
finds here in Gradiva by W. Jensen, and he
has
presented them in technical terms. He has pointed
out exhaustively, for the conditions
known as
hysteria and obsession, the suppression of impulses
and the repression of the ideas,
through which the
suppressed impulse is represented, as a characteristic
condition of psychic
disturbance, and he has
repeated the same view soon afterwards for many
kinds of delusion.[4]
Whether the impulses which
are, for this reason, considered are always components
of the sex-
impulse, or might be of a
different nature, is a problem of indifference in the
analysis of
Gradiva, as, in the case chosen by the
author, it is a matter only of the suppression of
the erotic
feeling. The views concerning psychic
conflict, and the formation of symptoms by
compromises
between the two psychic forces which are
struggling with each other, the present
writer has
found valid in cases professionally treated and
actually observed, in exactly the same
way that
he was able to observe it in Norbert Hanold, the
invention of our author.[5] The tracing
166
back of
neurotic, especially of hysterically morbid activities
to the influence of unconscious
thoughts, P. Janet,
the pupil of the great Charcot, had undertaken
before the present writer, and
in conjunction with
Josef Breuer in Vienna.[6]
It had actually occurred to the present writer,
when, in the years following 1893, he devoted
himself to investigations of the origin of psychic
disturbances, to seek confirmation of his
results
from authors, and therefore it was no slight
surprise to him to learn that in Gradiva,
published
in 1903, an author gave to his creation the very
foundation which the former
supposed that he,
himself, was finding authority for, as new, from
his experiences as a
physician. How did the
author come upon the same knowledge as the
physician, at least upon a
procedure which would
suggest that he possessed it?
Norbert Hanold’s delusion, we said, acquires
further development through a dream, which he
has in the midst of his efforts to authenticate a
gait like Gradiva’s in the streets of his home-
city.
The content of this dream we can outline briefly.
The dreamer is in Pompeii on that day
which
brought destruction to the unfortunate city,
experiences the horrors without himself
getting
into danger, suddenly sees Gradiva walking there
and immediately understands, as quite
natural,
that, as she is, of course, a Pompeiian, she is living
in her native city and “without his
167
having any
suspicion of it, was his contemporary.” He is
seized with fear for her, calls to her,
whereupon
she turns her face toward him momentarily. Yet
she walks on without heeding him
at all, lies down
on the steps of the Apollo temple, and is buried
by the rain of ashes, after her
face has changed
colour as if it were turning to white marble, until
it completely resembles a
bas-relief. On awakening,
he interprets the noise of the metropolis, which
reaches his ear, as the
cries for help of the desperate
inhabitants of Pompeii and the booming of the
turbulent sea. The
feeling that what he has
dreamed has really happened to him persists for
some time after his
awakening, and the conviction
that Gradiva lived in Pompeii and died on that
fatal day remains
from this dream as a new,
supplementary fact for his delusion.
It is less easy for us to say what the author of
Gradiva intended by this dream, and what caused
him to connect the development of this delusion
directly with a dream. Assiduous investigation
of
dreams has, to be sure, gathered enough examples
of the fact that mental disturbance is
connected
with and proceeds from dreams,[7] and even in the
life-history of certain eminent
men, impulses for
important deeds and decisions are said to have
been engendered by dreams;
but our comprehension
does not gain much by these analogies;
let us hold, therefore, to our
case, the case of the
archæologist, Norbert Hanold, a fiction of our
author. At which end must
one lay hold of such
a dream to introduce meaning into it, if it is not
to remain an unnecessary
168
adornment of fiction?
I can imagine that the reader exclaims at this
place: “The dream is, of
course, easy to explain—a
simple anxiety-dream, caused by the noise of the
metropolis, which
is given the new interpretation
of the destruction of Pompeii, by the archæologist
busied with
his Pompeiian girl!” On account of
the commonly prevailing disregard of the activities
of
dreams, one usually limits the demands for
dream-explanations so that one seeks for a part
of
the dream-content an external excitation which
covers itself by means of the content. This
external excitation for the dream would be given
by the noise which wakens the sleeper; the
interest
in this dream would be thereby terminated. Would
that we had even one reason to
suppose that the
metropolis had been noisier than usual on this
morning! If, for example, our
author had not
omitted to inform us that Hanold had that night,
contrary to his custom, slept by
an open window!
What a shame that our author didn’t take the
trouble! And if an anxiety-
dream were only so
simple a thing! No, this interest is not terminated
in so simple a way.
The connection with the external, sensory stimulus
is not at all essential for the dream-
formation.
The sleeper can neglect this excitation from the
outer world; he may be awakened
by it without
forming a dream, he may also weave it into his
dream, as happens here, if it is of
no use to him
from any other motive; and there is an abundance
of dreams for whose content
such a determination
by a sensory excitation of the sleeper cannot be
shown. No, let us try
another way.
169
Perhaps we can start from the residue which
the dream leaves in Hanold’s waking life. It
had
formerly been his fancy that Gradiva was
a Pompeiian. Now this assumption becomes a
certainty and the second certainty is added that
she was buried there in the year 79.[8] Sorrowful
feelings accompany this progress of the formation
of the delusion like an echo of the fear
which had
filled the dream. This new grief about Gradiva
will seem to us not exactly
comprehensible;
Gradiva would now have been dead for many
centuries even if she had been
saved in the year
79 from destruction. Or ought one to be permitted
to squabble thus with either
Norbert Hanold or his
creator? Here, too, no way seems to lead to explanation.
We wish,
nevertheless, to remark that a
very painful, emotional stress clings to the augmentation
which
the delusion derives from this dream.
Otherwise, however, our perplexity is not dispelled.
This dream does not explain itself; we
must decide to borrow from Traumdeutung by the
present writer, and to use some of the rules
given
there for the solution of dreams.
One of these rules is that a dream is regularly
connected with the day before the dream. Our
author seems to wish to intimate that he has
followed this rule by connecting the dream directly
with Hanold’s “pedestrian investigations.” Now
the latter means nothing but a search for
Gradiva
whom he expects to recognize by her characteristic
manner of walking. The dream
ought, therefore,
to contain a reference to where Gradiva is to be
found. It really does contain it
by showing her
in Pompeii, but that is no news for us.
170
Another rule says: If, after the dream, the reality of the dream-pictures continues unusually
long so that one cannot free himself from the dream, this is not a kind of mistake in judgment
called forth by the vividness of the dream-pictures, but is a psychic act in itself, an assurance
which refers to the dream-content, that something in it is as real as it has been dreamed to be,
and one is right to believe this assurance. If we stop at these two rules, we must decide that the
dream
gives real information about the whereabouts of
Gradiva, who is being sought. We now
know
Hanold’s dream; does the application of these
two rules lead to any sensible meaning?
Strange to say, yes. This meaning is disguised
only in a special way so that one does not
recognize
it immediately. Hanold learns in the dream that
the girl sought lives in the city and in
his own
day. That is, of course, true of Zoë Bertgang, only
that in his dream the city is not the
German
university-city, but Pompeii, the time not the
present, but the year 79, according to our
reckoning.
It is a kind of disfigurement by displacement;
not Gradiva is transported to the
present, but the
dreamer to the past; but we are also given the
essential and new fact that he
shares locality and
time with the girl sought. Whence, then, this
dissimulation and disguise
which must deceive us
as well as the dreamer about the peculiar meaning
and content of the
dream? Well, we have already
means at hand to give us a satisfactory answer to
this question.
Let us recall all that we have heard about the
nature and origin of fancies, these preliminaries of
171
delusion. They are substitution for and remnants
of different repressed memories, which a
resistance
does not allow to push into consciousness, which,
however, become conscious by
heeding the censor
of resistance, by means of transformations and
disfigurements. After this
compromise is completed,
the former memories have become fancies,
which may easily be
misunderstood by the conscious
person, that is, may be understood to be the ruling
psychic
force. Now let us suppose that the dream-pictures
are the so-called physiological delusion-
products
of a man, the compromise-results of that
struggle between what is repressed and what
is
dominant, which exist probably even in people
absolutely normal in the daytime. Then we
understand
that we have to consider the dream something
disfigured behind which there is to be
sought something else, not disfigured, but, in a
sense, something offensive, like Hanold’s
repressed
memories behind his fancies. One expresses the
admitted opposition by
distinguishing what the
dreamer remembers on waking, as manifest dream-content,
from what
formed the basis of the dream
before the censor’s disfigurement, the latent dream-thoughts.
To
interpret a dream, then, means to
translate the manifest dream-content into the
latent dream-
thoughts, which make retrogressive
the disfigurement that had to be approved by the
resistance
censor. When we turn these deliberations
to the dream which is occupying us, we
find that the
latent dream-thoughts must have
been as follows: “The girl who has that beautiful
walk, whom
172
you are seeking, lives really in this
city with you;” but in this form the thought could
not
become conscious; in its way there stood the
fact that a fancy had established, as a result of a
former compromise, the idea that Gradiva was a
Pompeiian girl, and therefore nothing
remained, if
the actual fact of her living in the same locality
and at the same time was to be
perceived, but to
assume the disfigurement: you are living in
Pompeii at the time of Gradiva;
and this then is
the idea which the manifest dream-content realizes
and represents as a present
time which he is living in.
A dream is rarely the representation, one might
say the staging, of a single thought, but
generally
of a number of them, a web of thoughts. In
Hanold’s dream there is conspicuous
another component
of the content, whose disfigurement is
easily put aside so that one may
learn the latent
idea represented by it. This is the end of the
dream to which the assurance of
reality can also
be extended. In the dream the beautiful walker,
Gradiva, is transformed into a
bas-relief. That is,
of course, nothing but an ingenious and poetic
representation of the actual
procedure. Hanold
had, indeed, transferred his interest from the
living girl to the bas-relief; the
beloved had been
transformed into a stone relief. The latent dream-thoughts,
which remain
unconscious, wish to transform
the relief back into the living girl; in
connection with the
foregoing they speak to him
somewhat as follows: “You are, of course, interested
in the bas-
relief of Gradiva only because it
reminds you of the present, here-living Zoë.” But
this insight
would mean the end of the delusion,
if it could become conscious.
173
Is it our duty to substitute unconscious thoughts
thus for every single bit of the manifest dream-
content?
Strictly speaking, yes; in the interpretation
of a dream which had actually been
dreamed, we should not be allowed to avoid this
duty. The dreamer would then have to give us
an exhaustive account. It is easily understood
that we cannot enforce such a demand in
connection
with the creature of our author; we will not,
however, overlook the fact that we have
not yet
submitted the chief content of this dream to the
work of interpretation and translation.
Hanold’s dream is, of course, an anxiety-dream.
Its content is fearful; anxiety is felt by the
dreamer in sleep, and painful feelings remain after
it. That is not of any great help for our
attempt
at explanation; we are again forced to borrow
largely from the teachings of dream-
interpretation.
This admonishes us not to fall into the error of
deriving the fear that is felt in a
dream from the
content of a dream, not to use the dream-content
like the content of ideas of
waking life. It calls
to our attention how often we dream the most
horrible things without
feeling any trace of fear.
Rather the true fact is a quite different one, which
cannot be easily
guessed, but can certainly be
proved. The fear of the anxiety-dream corresponds
to a sex-
feeling, a libidinous emotion, like
every neurotic fear, and has, through the process
of
174
repression, proceeded from the libido.[9] In the
interpretation of dreams, therefore, one must

substitute for fear sexual excitement. The fear which

has thus come into existence, exercises
now—not
regularly, but often—a selective influence on the
dream-content and brings into the
dream ideational
elements which seem suitable to this fear for the
conscious and erroneous
conception of the dream.
This is, as has been said, by no means regularly
the case, for there are
anxiety dreams in which
the content is not at all frightful, in which, therefore,
one cannot
explain consciously the anxiety
experienced.
I know that this explanation of fear in dreams
sounds odd, and is not easily believed; but I can
only advise making friends with it. It would, moreover,
be remarkable if Norbert Hanold’s
dream
allowed itself to be connected with this conception
of fear and to be explained by it. We
should then
say that in the dreamer, at night, the erotic desire
stirs, makes a powerful advance
to bring his
memory of the beloved into consciousness and thus
snatch him from the delusion,
experiences rejection
and transformation into fear, which now, on its
part, brings the fearful
pictures from the academic
memory of the dreamer into the dream-content.
In this way the
peculiar unconscious content of
the dream, the amorous longing for the once
known Zoë, is
transformed into the manifest-content
of the destruction of Pompeii and the
loss of Gradiva.
I think that sounds quite plausible so far. One
might justly demand that if erotic wishes form
the
undisfigured content of this dream, then one must
be able to point out, in the transformed
175
dream,
at least a recognizable remnant of them hidden
somewhere. Well, perhaps even this will
come
about with the help of a suggestion which appears
later in the story. At the first meeting
with the
supposed Gradiva, Hanold remembers this dream
and requests the apparition to lie
down again as
he has seen her.[10] Thereupon the young lady
rises, indignant, and leaves her
strange companion,
in whose delusion-ridden speech she has heard the
suggestion of an
improper erotic wish. I think we
may adopt Gradiva’s interpretation; even from
a real dream
one cannot always demand more
definiteness for the representation of an erotic
wish.
Thus the application of some rules of dream-interpretation
have been successful on Hanold’s
first dream, in making this dream comprehensible
to us in its chief features, and in fitting it into
the sequence of the story. Then it must probably
have been produced by its author with due
consideration
for these rules. One could raise only
one more question: why the author should
introduce
a dream for further development of the
delusion. Well, I think that is very cleverly
arranged and again keeps faith with reality. We
have already heard that in actual illness the
formation of a delusion is very often connected
with a dream, but after our explanation of the
nature of dreams, we need find no new riddle in
this fact. Dreams and delusion spring from the
176
same source, the repressed; the dream is, so to
speak, the physiological delusion of the normal
human being. Before the repressed has become
strong enough to push itself up into waking life
as delusion, it may easily have won its first success
under the more favourable circumstances of
sleep,
in the form of a dream having after-effects. During
sleep, with the diminution of psychic
activity,
there enters a slackening in the strength of the
resistance, which the dominant psychic
forces
oppose to the repressed. This slackening is what
makes the dream-formation possible
and therefore
the dream becomes, for us, the best means of
approach to knowledge of the
unconscious psyche.
Only the dream usually passes rapidly with the
re-establishment of the
psychic revival of waking
life, and the ground won by the unconscious is
again vacated.

177
III

In the further course of the story there is another

dream, which can tempt us, even more
perhaps than the first, to try to interpret it and
fit it into the psychic life of the hero; but we save
little if we leave the representation of the author
of Gradiva here, to hasten directly to this
second
dream, for whoever wishes to interpret the dream
of another, cannot help concerning
himself, as
extensively as possible, with every subjective and
objective experience of the
dreamer. Therefore
it would be best to hold to the thread of the
story and provide this with our
commentaries
as we progress.
The new delusion of the death of Gradiva at
the destruction of Pompeii in the year 79 is not
the
only after-effect of the first dream analysed
by us. Directly afterwards Hanold decides upon
a
trip to Italy, which finally takes him to Pompeii.
Before this, however, something else has
happened
to him; leaning from his window, he thinks he
sees on the street a figure with the
bearing and
walk of his Gradiva, hastens after her, in spite of
his scanty attire, does not
overtake her, but is
driven back by the jeers of the people on the
street. After he has returned to
178
his room, the song
of a canary whose cage hangs in the window of
the opposite house calls
forth in him a mood such
as if he wished to get from prison into freedom,
and the spring trip is
immediately decided upon
and accomplished.
Our author has put this trip of Hanold’s in an
especially strong light, and has given to the latter
partial clearness about his subjective processes.
Hanold has, of course, given himself a
scientific
purpose for his journey, but this is not substantial.
Yet he knows that the “impulse to
travel has
originated in a nameless feeling.” A peculiar restlessness
makes him dissatisfied with
everything
he encounters and drives him from Rome to Naples,
from there to Pompeii, without
his mood’s being set
right, even at the last halting-place. He is annoyed
by the foolishness of
honeymoon travellers, and is
enraged over the boldness of house-flies, which
populate the
hotels of Pompeii; but finally he
does not deceive himself over the fact that “his
dissatisfaction
was certainly not caused by his
surroundings alone, but, to a degree, found its
origin in him.”
He considers himself over-excited,
feels “that he was out of sorts because he lacked
something
without being able to explain what, and
this ill-humour he took everywhere with him.”
In such
a mood he is enraged even at his
mistress, science; as he wanders for the first
time in the glow
of the midday sun through
Pompeii, all his science had left him without
the least desire to
rediscover it; “he remembered
it as from a great distance, and he felt
that it had been an old,
dried-up, boresome aunt,
dullest and most superfluous creature in the
world.” (G. p. 48.)
179
In this uncomfortable and confused state of
mind, one of the riddles which are connected with
this journey is solved for him at the moment when
he first sees Gradiva walking through
Pompeii;
“he became conscious, for the first time, that he
had, without himself knowing the
motive in his
heart, come to Italy on that account and had,
without stop, continued from Rome
and Naples
to Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of
her—and that in a literal sense—for,
with her
unusual gait, she must have left behind in the
ashes a foot-print different from all the
others.”
(G. p. 50.)
As our author has put so much care into the
delineation of this trip, it must be worth our
while
to explain its relation to Hanold’s delusion
and its place in the sequence of events. The journey
is undertaken for motives which the character
does not at first recognize and does not admit
until later, motives which our author designates
directly as “unconscious.” This is certainly true
to life; one does not need to have a delusion to
act thus; rather it is an everyday occurrence,
even for normal people, that they are deceived
about the motives of their actions and do not
become conscious of them until subsequently,
when a conflict of several emotional currents re-
establishes
for them the condition for such confusion.
Hanold’s trip, therefore, was intended,
from the beginning, to serve the delusion, and
was to take him to Pompeii to continue there the
search for Gradiva. Let us remember that before,
and directly after the dream, this search filled
180
his
mind and that the dream itself was only a stifled
answer of his consciousness to the question
of
the whereabouts of Gradiva. Some force which
we do not recognize, however, next prevents
the
plan of the delusion from becoming conscious, so
that only insufficient pretexts, which can
be but
partially revived, remain as a conscious motivation
for the trip. The author gives us
another riddle
by having the dream, the discovery of the supposed
Gradiva on the street, and
the decision to
make the journey because of the influence of the
singing canary follow one
another like chance
occurrences without inner coherence.
With the help of the explanations which we
gather from the later speeches of Zoë Bertgang,
this obscure part of the tale is illuminated for our
understanding. It was really the original of
Gradiva,
Miss Zoë, herself, whom Hanold saw from
his window walking on the street (G. p.
23), and whom he would soon have overtaken. The statement
of the dreamer—“she is really
living now
in the present, in the same city with you,”—would,
therefore, by a lucky chance,
have experienced
an irrefutable corroboration, before which
his inner resistance would have
collapsed. The
canary, however, whose song impelled Hanold to
go away, belonged to Zoë,
and his cage was in
her window, in the house diagonally opposite
from Hanold’s (G. p. 98).
Hanold, who, according
to the girl’s arraignment, was endowed with negative
hallucination,
understood the art of not seeing
nor recognizing people, and must from the beginning
have had
unconscious knowledge of what
we do not discover until later. The signs of
Zoë’s proximity,
181
her appearance on the street,
and her bird’s song so near his window intensify
the effect of the
dream, and in this condition, so
dangerous for his resistance to the eroticism, he
takes flight.
The journey arises from the recovery
of the resistance after that advance of erotic desire
in the
dream, an attempt at flight from the living
and present beloved. It means practically a victory
for repression, which, this time, in the delusion
keeps the upper hand, as, in his former action,
the “pedestrian investigations” of women and
girls, the eroticism had been victorious.
Everywhere,
however, the indecision of the struggle, the
compromise nature of the results was
evident;
the trip to Pompeii, which is to take him away
from the living Zoë leads, at any rate, to
her substitute,
Gradiva. The journey, which is undertaken
in defiance of the most recent dream-
thoughts,
follows, however, the order of the manifest
dream-content to Pompeii. Thus delusion
triumphs anew every time that eroticism and
resistance struggle anew.
This conception of Hanold’s trip, as a flight
from the erotic desire for the beloved, who is so
near, which is awakening in him, harmonizes, however,
with the frame of mind portrayed in
him
during his stay in Italy. The rejection of the
eroticism, which dominates him, expresses
itself
there in his abhorrence of honeymoon travellers.
A little dream in the “albergo” in Rome,
caused
by the proximity of a couple of German lovers,
“Augustus” and “Gretchen,” whose
evening
conversation he is forced to overhear through the
thin partition, casts a further light on
182
the erotic
tendencies of his first great dream. The new dream
transports him again to Pompeii
where Vesuvius
is just having another eruption, and thus refers
to the dream which continues
active during his
trip; but among the imperilled people he sees this
time—not as before himself
and Gradiva—but
Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus,—doubtless
ironic exaltation of
the couple in the
adjoining room. Apollo lifts Venus, carries her
away, and lays her on an
object in the dark,
which seems to be a carriage or a cart, for a
“rattling sound” comes from it.
Otherwise the
dream needs no special skill for its interpretation.
(G. p. 32.)
Our author, whom we have long relied on not
to make a single stroke in his picture idly and
without purpose, has given us another bit of testimony
for the non-sexual force dominating
Hanold
on the trip. During hours of wandering in Pompeii,
it happens that “remarkably, it did
not once
appear in his memory that he had dreamed some
time ago that he had been present at
the destruction
of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of 79.”
(G. p. 42.) At sight of Gradiva he
first suddenly
remembers this dream, and at the same time the
motive of the delusion for his
puzzling journey
becomes conscious. Then what other meaning
could there be for forgetting
the dream, this
repression-boundary between the dream and the
psychic condition of the
journey, than that the
journey is not the result of the direct instigation
of the dream, but of the
rejection of this latter,
as the emanation from a psychic force which
desires no knowledge of
the secret meaning of
the dream?
183
On the other hand, however, Hanold is not
happy at this victory over his eroticism. The
suppressed psychic impulse remains strong enough
to revenge itself, by discontent and
interception,
on the suppressing agency. His longing has
changed to restlessness and
dissatisfaction, which
make the trip seem senseless to him. His insight
into the motivation of
his trip is obstructed in
service of the delusion; his relation to science,
which ought, in such a
place, to stir all his interest,
is upset. So our author shows his hero, after flight
from love, in a
sort of crisis, in an utterly confused
and unsettled condition, in a derangement such
as usually
appears at the climax of illness if neither
of the two struggling forces is so much stronger
than
the other, that the difference could establish
a strict, psychic régime. Here then our author
takes
hold to help and to settle, for, at this place,
he introduces Gradiva, who undertakes the cure of
the delusion. With his power to direct to a happy
solution the fortunes of all the characters
created
by him, in spite of all the requirements which
he has them conform to, he transports the
girl,
from whom Hanold has fled to Pompeii, to
that very place and thus corrects the folly
which
the delusion caused the young man to commit in
leaving the home-city of his beloved
for the
dead abode of the one substituted for her by
his fancy.
With the appearance of Zoë Bertgang as Gradiva,
which marks the climax of the suspense of
the story, our interest is soon diverted. If we
have hitherto been living through the
184
developments
of a delusion, we shall now become witnesses
of its cure, and may ask ourselves
if our author
has merely invented the procedure of this cure or
has carried it out according to
actually existing
possibilities. From Zoë’s own words in the conversation
with her friend, we
have decidedly the
right to ascribe to her the intention to cure the
hero (G. p. 97). But how does
she go about it?
After she has cast aside the indignation which the
unreasonable request, to lie
down to sleep again,
as “then,” had evoked in her, she appears again
next day, at the same
place, and elicits from
Hanold all the secret knowledge that was lacking
to her for an
understanding of his conduct of the
previous day. She learns of his dream, of the bas-relief
of
Gradiva, and of the peculiarity of walk
which she shares with the relief. She accepts
the rôle of
a spirit awakened to life for a short
hour, which, she observes, his delusion assigns
to her, and
in ambiguous words, she gently
puts him in the way of a new rôle by accepting
from him the
grave-flower which he had
brought along without conscious purpose, and
expresses regret that
he has not given her roses
(G. p. 70).
Our interest in the conduct of the eminently
clever girl, who has decided to win the lover of
her
youth as husband, after she has recognized
his love behind his delusion as its impelling force,
is, however, restrained at this place probably
because of the strange feelings that the delusion
can arouse even in us. Its latest development,
that Gradiva, who was buried in the year 79, can
now exchange conversation with him as a noon-spirit,
for an hour, after the passing of which
185
she
sinks out of sight or seeks her grave again, this
chimæra, which is not confused by the
perception
of her modern foot-covering, nor by her ignorance
of the ancient tongues, nor by her
command of
German, which did not exist in former times,
seems indeed to justify the author’s
designation,
“A Pompeiian Fancy,” but to exclude every
standard of clinical reality; and yet on
closer
consideration the improbability in this delusion
seems to me, for the most part, to vanish.
To be
sure, our author has taken upon himself a part
of the blame, and in the first part of the
story has
offered the fact that Zoë was the image of the
bas-relief in every trait. One must,
therefore,
guard against transferring the improbability of
this preliminary to its logical
conclusion that
Hanold considers the girl to be Gradiva come to
life. The explanation of the
delusion is here enhanced
by the fact that our author has offered us
no rational disposal of it. In
the glowing sun of
the Campagna and in the bewildering magic powers
of the vine which
grows on Vesuvius, our author
has introduced helpful and mitigating circumstances
of the
transgression of the hero. The most
important of all explanatory and exonerating
considerations
remains, however, the facility with
which our intellect decides to accept an absurd
content if
impulses with a strong emotional stress
find thereby their satisfaction. It is astonishing,
and
generally meets with too little acceptance,
how easily and often intelligent people, under such
psychological constellations, give the reactions of
partial mental weakness, and any one who is
186
not
too conceited may observe this in himself as often
as he wishes, and especially when a part
of the
thought-processes under consideration is connected
with unconscious or repressed
motives. I cite, in
this connection, the words of a philosopher who
writes to me, “I have also
begun to make note
of cases of striking mistakes, from my own experience,
and of thoughtless
actions which one subsequently
explains to himself (in a very unreasonable
way). It is amazing
but typical how much stupidity
thereby comes to light.” Now let us consider the
fact that belief
in spirits, apparitions and returning
souls (which finds so much support in the
religions to
which, at least as children, we have all
clung) is by no means destroyed among all educated
people, and that many otherwise reasonable
people find their interest in spiritism compatible
with their reason. Yes, even one become dispassionate
and incredulous may perceive with
shame
how easily he turns back for a moment to a belief
in spirits, when emotions and
perplexity concur
in him. I know of a physician who had once lost
a patient by Basedow’s
disease and could not rid
himself of the slight suspicion that he had perhaps
contributed by
unwise medication to the unfortunate
outcome. One day several years later there
stepped into
his office a girl, in whom, in spite of
all reluctance, he was obliged to recognize the
dead
woman. His only thought was that it was
true that the dead could return, and his fear did
not
give way to shame until the visitor introduced
herself as the sister of the woman who had died
of that disease. Basedow’s disease lends to those
afflicted with it a great similarity of features,
187
which has often been noticed, and in this case
the typical resemblance was far more
exaggerated
than the family resemblance. The physician, moreover,
to whom this happened
was I, and therefore
I am not inclined to quarrel with Norbert
Hanold over the clinical
possibility of his short
delusion about Gradiva, who had returned to life.
That in serious cases
of chronic delusion (paranoia)
the most extreme absurdities, ingeniously devised
and well
supported, are active is, finally, well
known to every psychiatrist.
After his first meeting with Gradiva, Norbert
Hanold had drunk his wine in first one and then
another of the hotels of Pompeii known to him,
while the other guests were having their regular
meals. “Of course, in no way had the absurd
supposition entered his mind” that he was doing
this to find out what hotel Gradiva lived and ate
in, but it is hard to say what other significance
his action could have. On the day after his second
meeting in Meleager’s house, he has all sorts
of
remarkable and apparently disconnected experiences;
he finds a narrow cleft in the wall of
the portico where Gradiva had disappeared, meets
a foolish lizard-catcher, who addresses him
as
an acquaintance, discovers a secluded hotel, the
“Albergo del Sole,” whose owner talks him
into
buying a metal brooch encrusted with green patina,
which had been found with the remains
of a Pompeiian
girl, and finally notices in his own hotel a
newly-arrived young couple, whom
he diagnoses
to be brother and sister, and congenial. All these
impressions are then woven into
a “remarkably
nonsensical” dream as follows:
188
“Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a
trap out of a blade of grass in order to catch
a
lizard, and she said, ‘Please stay quite still—my
colleague is right; the method is really good
and
she has used it with the greatest success.’”
To this dream he offers resistance even while
sleeping, with the critique that it is indeed the
most utter madness, and he casts about to free
himself from it. He succeeds in doing this, too,
with the aid of an invisible bird who utters a
short, merry call, and carries the lizard away in
his
beak.
Shall we risk an attempt to interpret this
dream also, that is, to substitute for it the latent
thoughts from whose disfigurement it must have
proceeded? It is as nonsensical as one could
expect
a dream to be and this absurdity of dreams
is the mainstay of the view which denies to
the
dream the character of a valid psychic act, and
has it proceed from a desultory stimulus of
the
psychic elements.
We can apply to this dream the technique
which can be designated as the regular procedure
of
dream-interpretation. It consists in disregarding
the apparent sequence in the manifest dream
but in examining separately every part of the
content, and in seeking its derivation in the
impressions,
memories and free ideas of the dreamer.
As we cannot examine Hanold, however,
we must
be satisfied with reference to his impressions, and
may with due caution substitute our
own ideas
for his.
“Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat catching
lizards, and said ...” What impression of the
day is
189
this part of the dream reminiscent of?
Unquestionably of the meeting with the older
man, the
lizard-catcher, for whom Gradiva is
substituted in the dream. He was sitting or lying
on a “hot,
sunny” slope and spoke to Hanold, too.
Even the utterances of Gradiva in the dream are
copied
from those of the man. Let us compare:
“‘The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer,
is
really good; I have already used it often with
the best of success. Please remain quite still.’”—
Quite
similarly Gradiva speaks in the dream, only
that for the colleague, Eimer, is substituted
an
unnamed woman-colleague; the often from the
zoologist’s speech is missing in the dream,
and the
connection between the statements has been somewhat
changed. It seems, therefore,
that this experience
of the day has been transformed into a dream
by some changes and
disfigurements. Why thus,
and what is the meaning of the disfigurements,
the substitution of
Gradiva for the old gentleman,
and the introduction of the puzzling “woman-colleague”?
There is a rule of dream-interpretation as follows:
A speech heard in a dream always originates
from a speech either heard or uttered in waking
life. Well, this rule seems followed here; the
speech of Gradiva is only a modification of a speech
heard in the daytime from the zoologist.
Another
rule of dream-interpretation would tell us that the
substitution of one person for
another, or the
mixture of two people by showing one in a position
which characterizes the
other means equivalence
of the two people, a correspondence between them.
Let us venture to
190
apply this rule also to our dream;
then the interpretation would follow: “Gradiva
catches
lizards, as that old gentleman does, and
like him, is skilled in lizard-catching.” This result
is not
comprehensible yet, but we have another
riddle before us. To which impression of the day
shall
we refer the “woman colleague,” who is
substituted in the dream for the famous zoologist,
Eimer? We have here fortunately not much
choice; only one other girl can be meant by
“woman-colleague,” the congenial young lady in
whom Hanold has conjectured a sister
travelling
with her brother. “In her gown she wore a red
Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as he
looked
across from his corner, stirred something in his
memory without his being able to think
what it
was.” This observation on the part of the author
surely gives us the right to assert that
she is the
“woman-colleague” of the dream. What Hanold
cannot remember is certainly nothing
but the
remark of the supposed Gradiva, as she asked
him for the grave-flower, that to more
fortunate
girls one brought roses in spring. In this
speech, however, lay a hidden wooing. What
kind of lizard-catching is it that this more
fortunate woman-colleague has been so successful
with?
On the next day Hanold surprises the supposed
brother and sister in tender embrace and can
thus
correct his mistake of the previous day. They are
really a couple of lovers, on their
honeymoon, as
we later learn, when the two disturb, so unexpectedly,
Hanold’s third meeting
with Zoë. If we
will now accept the idea that Hanold, who consciously
considers them brother
191
and sister, has,
in his unconscious, recognized at once their
real relation, which on the next day
betrays itself
so unequivocally, there results a good meaning for
Gradiva’s remark in the
dream. The red rose
then becomes a symbol for being in love; Hanold
understands that the two
are as Gradiva and he
are soon to be; the lizard-catching acquires the
meaning of husband-
catching, and Gradiva’s
speech means something like this: “Let me
arrange things; I know how
to win a husband
as well as this other girl does.”
Why must this penetration of Zoë’s intentions
appear throughout in the form of the speech of
the old zoologist? Why is Zoë’s skill in husband-catching
represented by that of the old man in
lizard-catching? Well, it is easy for us to answer
that question; we have long ago guessed that
the
lizard-catcher is none other than the professor of
zoology, Bertgang, Zoë’s father, who
must, of
course, also know Hanold, so that it is a matter
of course that he addresses Hanold as
an acquaintance.
Again, let us accept the idea that Hanold,
in his unconscious, immediately
recognizes the
professor—“It seemed to him dimly that he had
already seen the face of the
lizard-hunter probably
in one of the two hotels.” Thus is explained the
strange cloaking of the
purpose attributed to Zoë.
She is the daughter of the lizard-catcher; she has
inherited this skill
from him. The substitution of
Gradiva for the lizard-catcher in the dream-content,
is, therefore,
the representation of the relation
between the two people, which was recognized by
the
unconscious; the introduction of “woman-colleague”
in place of colleague, Eimer, allows the
192
dream to express comprehension of her courtship
of the man. The dream has welded two of the
day’s experiences in one situation, “condensed”
as we say, in order to procure, to be sure, very
indiscernible expression for two ideas which are
not allowed to become conscious; but we can
go
on diminishing the strangeness of the dream still
more and pointing out the influence of
other experiences
of the day on the formation of the manifest
dream.
Dissatisfied by the former information, we might
explain why the scene of the lizard-catching
was
made the nucleus of the dream, and suppose that
the other elements in the dream-thoughts
influence
the term “lizard” in the manifest dream. It
might really be very easy. Let us recall that
Hanold has discovered a cleft in the wall, in the
place where Gradiva seems to him to
disappear;
this is “wide enough to afford passage to an unusually
slender figure.” By this
perception he is
forced in the day-time to an alteration in his
delusion; Gradiva did not sink into
the ground
when she disappeared from his sight, but was
going back, by this route, to her
grave. In his
unconscious thought he might say to himself that
he had now found the natural
explanation for the
surprising disappearance of the girl; but must
not forcing one’s self through
narrow clefts, and
disappearing in such clefts recall the conduct of
lizards? Does not Gradiva
herself, then, in this
connection, behave like an agile little lizard? We
think, therefore, that the
discovery of this cleft in
the wall had worked as a determinant on the
choice of the “lizard”
193
element for the manifest
dream-content; the lizard-situation of the
dream, therefore, represented
this impression of
the day, and the meeting with the zoologist,
Zoë’s father.
What if, become bold, we now wished to attempt
to find in the dream-content a representation
also
for the one experience of the day which has not
yet been turned to account, the discovery
of the
third hotel, “del Sole”? Our author has treated
this episode so exhaustively and linked so
much
with it, we should be surprised if it, alone, had
yielded no contribution to the dream-
formation.
Hanold enters this hotel, which, because of its
secluded situation and its distance
from the station,
has remained unknown to him, to get a bottle of
lime-water for congestion of
blood. The hotel-keeper
uses this opportunity to extol his antiques
and shows him a brooch
which, it was alleged,
had belonged to that Pompeiian girl who was
found near the Forum in
fond embrace with her
lover. Hanold, who had never before believed this
frequently repeated
story, is now compelled, by
a force strange to him, to believe in the truth of
this touching story
and in the genuineness of the
article found, buys the brooch and leaves the hotel
with his
purchase. In passing, he sees nodding
down at him from one of the windows a cluster
of white,
asphodel blossoms which had been placed
in a water-glass, and he feels that this sight is
an
attestation of the genuineness of his new possession.
The sincere conviction is now impressed
upon him that the green brooch belonged to
Gradiva, and that she was the girl who died in
her
194
lover’s embrace. The tormenting jealousy,
which thereupon seizes him, he appeases with the

resolution to assure himself about this suspicion,

the next day, from Gradiva, herself, by
showing
the brooch. This is a strange bit of new delusion;
and shouldn’t any trace point to it in
the dream
of the following night?
It will be well worth our while to get an understanding
of the origin of this augmentation of the
delusion, to look up the new unconscious idea for
which the new bit of delusion is substituted.
The
delusion originates under the influence of the
proprietor of the “Sun Hotel,” toward whom
Hanold conducts himself in so remarkably credulous
a manner, as if he has received a
suggestion
from him. The proprietor shows him a small
metal brooch as genuine, and as the
possession of
that girl who was found in the arms of her lover,
buried in the ashes, and Hanold,
who could be
critical enough to doubt the truth of the story as
well as the genuineness of the
brooch, is caught,
credulous, and buys the more than doubtful antique.
It is quite
incomprehensible why he should act so,
and no hint is given that the personality of the
proprietor himself might solve this riddle for us.
There is, however, another riddle in this
incident, and
two riddles sometimes solve each other. On leaving
the “albergo,” he catches
sight of an asphodel
cluster in a glass at a window, and finds in it an
attestation of the
genuineness of the metal brooch.
How can that be? This last stroke is fortunately
easy of
solution. The white flower is, of course, the
one which he presented to Gradiva at noon, and
it
is quite right that through the sight of it at one
of the windows of this hotel, something is
195
corroborated,
not the genuineness of the brooch, but
something else which has become clear to
him at
the discovery of this formerly overlooked “albergo.”
In the forenoon he has already
acted as if he were
seeking, in the two hotels of Pompeii, where the
person lived who appeared
to him as Gradiva.
Now, as he stumbles so unexpectedly upon a third,
he must say in the
unconscious: “So she lives
here”; and then, on leaving: “Right there is
the asphodel flower I
gave her; that is, therefore,
her window.” This, then, is the new idea for
which the delusion is
substituted, and which
cannot become conscious because its assumption
that Gradiva is living,
a person known by him,
cannot become conscious.
How then is the substitution of the delusion for
the new idea supposed to have occurred? I think
thus: that the feeling of conviction which clung
to the idea was able to assert itself and
persisted,
while another ideational content related to it by
thought-connection acted as
substitute for the
idea itself which was incapable of consciousness.
Thus the feeling of
conviction was connected with
a really strange content, and this latter attained,
as delusion, a
recognition which did not belong
to it. Hanold transfers his conviction that Gradiva
lives in this
house to other impressions which he
receives in this house, becomes, in a way, credulous
about
what the proprietor says, the genuineness
of the metal brooch, and the truth of the anecdote
about the lovers found in an embrace, but only
by this route, that he connects what he has heard
in this house with Gradiva. The jealousy which
has been lying ready in him gets possession of
196
this
material, and even in contradiction to his first
dream there appears the delusion that
Gradiva
was the girl who died in the arms of her lover,
and that the brooch which he bought
belonged
to her.
We notice that the conversation with Gradiva,
and her gentle wooing “through the flower,”
have
already evoked important changes in Hanold.
Traits of male desire, components of the
libido are
awakened in him, which, to be sure, cannot yet
dispense with the concealment
through conscious
pretexts; but the problem of the corporeal nature
of Gradiva, which has
pursued him this whole day,
cannot disavow its derivation from the erotic
desire of the young
man for possession of the
woman, even if it is dragged into the scientific
world by conscious
stress on Gradiva’s peculiar
hovering between life and death. Jealousy is an
added mark of
Hanold’s awakening activity in
love; he expresses this at the opening of the conversation
on the
next day, and with the aid of
a new pretext achieves his object of touching
the girl’s body, and
of striking her, as in times
long past.
Now, however, it is time to ask if the course
of delusion-formation which we have inferred
from our author’s representation is one otherwise
admitted or possible. From my experience as
physician, I can answer only that it is surely the
right way, perhaps the only one, in which the
delusion receives the unswerving recognition due
to its clinical character. If the patient believes
in
his delusion so firmly, it does not happen because
of inversion of his powers of judgment,
197
and does
not proceed from what is erroneous in the
delusion; but in every delusion there lies
also a little
grain of truth; there is something in it which
really deserves belief, and this is the
source of the
conviction of the patient, who is, to this extent,
justified. This true element,
however, has been
repressed for a long time; if it finally succeeds in
pushing into
consciousness (this time in disfigured
form), the feeling of a conviction clinging to it,
as if in
compensation, is over-strong and now
clings to and protects the disfigurement-substitute
of the
repressed, true element against every critical
impugnment. The conviction at once shifts itself
from the unconscious, true element to the conscious,
erroneous one connected with it, and
remains
fixed there as a result of this very displacement.
The case of delusion-formation which
resulted from
Hanold’s first dream is nothing but a similar, if
not identical, case of such
displacement. Yes, the
depicted manner of development of conviction in
the delusion is not
fundamentally different from
the way in which conviction is formed in normal
cases, where
repression does not enter into play.
All our convictions lie in thought-contents in
which the true
and the false are combined and
they stretch over the former and the latter. They
differentiate at
once between the true and whatever
false is associated with it and protect this,
even if not so
immutably as in the delusion,
against merited critique. Associations, protection,
likewise, have
their own value even for normal
psychology.
I will now return to the dream and lay stress on
a small, but not uninteresting feature which
198
establishes
a connection between two occasions of the
dream. Gradiva had placed the white
asphodel
flower in definite contrast to the red rose; the
finding of the asphodel flower again in
the window
of the “Albergo del Sole” becomes a weighty
proof for Hanold’s unconscious idea
which expresses
itself in a new delusion; and to this is
added the fact that the red rose in the
dress of the
congenial young girl helps Hanold again, in the
unconscious, to a right estimation
of her relation
to her companion so that he can have her enter
the dream as “woman colleague.”
But where in the manifest dream-content is
found the trace and representation of that discovery
of Hanold’s for which we find that the
new delusion is substituted, the discovery that
Gradiva
lives with her father in the third hotel
of Pompeii, the “Albergo del Sole,” which he has
not
been acquainted with? Well, it stands in its
entirety and not even much disfigured in the
dream;
but I dread to point it out, for I know
that even with the readers whose patience with
me has
lasted so long, a strong opposition to my
attempts at interpretation will be stirred up.
Hanold’s
discovery is given in full in the dream-content,
I repeat, but so cleverly concealed that
one must
needs overlook it. It is hidden there
behind a play on words, an ambiguity. “Somewhere
in the
sun Gradiva sat”; this we have
rightly connected with the locality where Hanold
met the
zoologist, her father; but can it not also
mean in the “Sun,” that is, in the “Albergo del
Sole,” in
the “Sun Hotel” Gradiva lives? And
doesn’t the “somewhere” which has no reference
to the
199
meeting with her father sound so
hypocritically indefinite for the very reason that it introduces
the definite information about the whereabouts of Gradiva? According to previous experience
in the interpretation of real dreams, I am quite sure of such a meaning in the ambiguity, but I
should really not venture to offer this bit of interpretation to my readers, if our author did not
lend me here his powerful assistance. On the next day he puts into the mouth of the girl, when
she sees the metal brooch, the same pun which we accept for the interpretation of the dream-
content. “Did you find it in the sun, perhaps? It brings to light many such works of art”;
and as
Hanold does not understand the speech,
she explains that she means the “Sun Hotel,”
which is
called “Sole” here, whence the supposed
antique is also familiar to her.
And now may we make the attempt to substitute
for Hanold’s “remarkably nonsensical”
dream
unconscious thoughts hidden behind it and
as unlike it as possible? It runs somewhat as
follows: “She lives in the ‘Sun’ with her father;
why is she playing such a game with me? Does
she wish to make fun of me? Or could it be
possible that she loves me and wishes me for a
husband?” To this latter possibility there now
follows in sleep the rejection, “That is the most
utter madness,” which is apparently directed
against the whole manifest dream.
Critical readers have now the right to inquire
about the origin of that interpolation, not formerly
established, which refers to being made fun
of by Gradiva. To this Traumdeutung gives
the
200
answer; if in dream-thoughts, taunts and
sneers, or bitter contradictions occur, they are
expressed by the nonsensical course of the manifest
dream, through the absurdity in the dream.
The latter means, therefore, no paralysis of psychic
activity, but is one of the means of
representation
which the dream-work makes use of. As always
in especially difficult passages,
our author here
comes to our assistance. The nonsensical dream
has another postlude in which
a bird utters a
merry call and takes away the lizard in his beak.
Such a laughing call Hanold had
heard after
Gradiva’s disappearance. It really came from Zoë
who was shaking off the
melancholy seriousness
of her lower world rôle; with this laugh Gradiva
had really derided
him. The dream-picture,
however, of the bird carrying away the lizard
may recall that other one
in a former dream in
which Apollo Belvedere carried away the Capitoline
Venus.
Perhaps the impression now exists with many
readers that the interpretation of the lizard-
catching
situation by the idea of wooing is not
sufficiently justified. Additional support is found
here, perhaps in the hint that Zoë, in conversation
with her colleague, admits about herself that
very
thing which Hanold’s thoughts suppose about
her, when she tells that she had been sure of
“digging up” something interesting for herself
here in Pompeii. She thereby delves into the
archæological series of associations as he did
into the zoological with his allegory of lizard-
catching,
as if they were opposing each other
and each wished to assume properties of the
other.
201
Thus we have finished the interpretation of the
second dream. Both have become accessible to
our understanding under the presupposition that
the dreamer, in his unconscious thought,
knows
all that he has forgotten in his conscious, has in
the former rightly judged everything
which, in
the latter, he delusively misconstrues. In this
connection we have, of course, been
obliged to
make many assertions which sounded odd to the
reader because they were strange to
him and probably
often awakened the suspicion that we were
giving out as our author’s
meaning what is only
our own meaning. We are ready to do everything
to dissipate this
suspicion and will therefore
gladly consider more exhaustively one of the
most knotty points—
I mean the use of ambiguous
words and speeches as in the example, “Somewhere
in the Sun
Gradiva sat.”
It must be striking to every reader of Gradiva
how often our author puts into the mouths of
both the leading characters speeches which have
double meaning. For Hanold these speeches
are
intended to have only one meaning, and only his
companion, Gradiva, is affected by their
other
meaning. Thus, after her first answer, he exclaims:
“I knew that your voice sounded so,”
and the yet unenlightened Zoë has to ask how
that is possible, as he has never before heard her
speak. In the second conversation, the girl is
for a moment puzzled by his delusion, as he
assures
her that he recognized her at once. She must
understand these words in the meaning
that is
correct for his unconscious, as his recognition of
their acquaintance which reaches back
202
into
childhood, while he, of course, knows nothing of this
meaning of his speech and explains it
only by
reference to the delusion which dominates him.
The speeches of the girl, on the other
hand, in
whose person the most brilliant mental clarity is
opposed to the delusion, are made
intentionally
ambiguous. One meaning of them falls in with
the ideas of Hanold’s delusion, in
order to
enable her to penetrate into his conscious comprehension,
the other raises itself above
the
delusion, and, as a rule, gives us the interpretation
of it in the unconscious truth which has
been represented by it. It is a triumph of wit
to be able to represent the delusion and the
truth in
the same expression.
Interspersed with such ambiguities is Zoë’s
speech in which she explains the situation to her
girl friend and at the same time rids herself of
her disturbing society; it is really spoken out
of
the book, calculated more for us readers than
for her happy colleague. In the conversations
with
Hanold, the double meaning is chiefly established
by the fact that Zoë makes use of the
symbolism
which we find followed in Hanold’s first
dream, in the equivalence of repression
and destruction,
Pompeii and childhood. Thus on the
one hand she can, in her speeches,
continue in
the rôle which Hanold’s delusion assigns to her,
on the other, she can touch upon
the real relations,
and awaken in Hanold’s unconscious a knowledge
of them.
“I have long accustomed myself to being
dead.” (G. p. 70.) “For me, the flower of
oblivion is
203
the right one from your hand” (G.
p. 70). In these speeches is given lightly the
reproof which
then breaks out clearly enough in
her last sermon when she compares him to an
archæopteryx.
“That a person must die to
become alive again; but for archæologists that is,
of course,
necessary” (G. p. 102), she continues
after the solution of the delusion as if to give us
the key
to her ambiguous speeches. The most
beautiful symbolism appears, however, in the
question
(G. p. 88): “It seems to me as
if we had already eaten our bread thus together
once two
thousand years ago. Can’t you remember
it?” In this speech the substitution
of historic
antiquity for childhood, and the effort
to awaken his memory of the latter are quite
unmistakable.
Whence, therefore, comes this striking preference
for ambiguous speeches in Gradiva? It seems
to us not chance, but the necessary sequence from
the preliminaries of the tale. It is nothing but
the counterpart of the twofold determination of
symptoms in so far as the speeches are
themselves
symptoms and proceed from compromises between
the conscious and the
unconscious; but one
notices this double origin in the speeches more
easily than in the acts; and
when, as the pliability
of the material of conversation often makes possible,
each of the two
intentions of a speech succeeds
by the same arrangement of words in expressing
itself well,
then there is present what we call an
“ambiguity.”
During the psychotherapeutic treatment of a
delusion, or an analogous disturbance, one often
204
evolves such ambiguous speeches in patients as
new symptoms of the most fleeting duration,
and
can even succeed in making use of them, whereby,
with the meaning intended for the
consciousness
of the patient, one can, not infrequently, stimulate
the understanding for the one
valid in the unconscious.
I know from experience that among
the uninitiate this rôle of
ambiguity usually gives
the greatest offence, and causes the grossest misunderstanding,
but our
author was right, at any
rate, in representing in his production this characteristic
feature of the
processes of the formation
of dream and delusion.

205
IV

With Zoë’s entrance as physician there is

awakened in us, we said, a new interest.
We are eager
to learn if such a cure as she accomplishes
on Hanold is comprehensible or possible,
whether
our author has observed the conditions
of the passing of a delusion as correctly as those
of its
development.
Without doubt a view will be advanced denying
to the case portrayed by our author such a
principal
interest, and recognizing no problem requiring
an explanation. For Hanold nothing
more remains,
it might be asserted, but to solve his delusion
again, after its object, the supposed
Gradiva,
conveys to him the incorrectness of all his assertions
and gives him the most natural
explanations
for everything puzzling; for example, how she
knows his name. Thereby the affair
would be
settled logically; as, however, the girl in this case
has confessed her love, for the
satisfaction of his
feminine readers, our author would surely allow
the otherwise not
uninteresting story to end in the
usually happy way, marriage. More consistent,
and just as
possible, would have been the different
conclusion that the young scholar, after the explanation
206
of his mistake, should, with polite thanks,
take his leave of the young lady and in that way

motivate the rejection of her love so that he might

offer an intense interest to ancient women of
bronze or stone, or the originals of these, if they
were attainable, but might have no idea of how
to
deal with a girl of flesh and blood of his own time.
The archæological fancy was most
arbitrarily cemented
into a love-story by our author, himself.
In discountenancing this conception as impossible,
our attention is first called to the fact that
we have to attribute the change beginning in
Norbert Hanold not to the relinquishment of the
delusion alone. At the same time, indeed before
the solution of the latter, there is in him an
undeniable
awakening of the desire for love, which,
of course, results in his asking for the hand
of the
girl who has freed him from delusion. We have
already shown under what pretexts and
cloakings,
curiosity about her corporeal nature, jealousy,
and the brutal male impulse for
possession are
expressed in him in the midst of the delusion, since
repressed desire put the first
dream into his mind.
Let us add the further testimony that in the
evening after the second talk
with Gradiva a living
woman for the first time seems congenial to him,
although he still makes
the concession to his
abhorrence of honeymoon travellers, by not recognizing
the congenial girl
as newly married. The
next forenoon, however, chance makes him witness
of an exchange of
caresses between the girl and
her supposed brother, and he draws back shyly
as if he had
disturbed a holy ceremony. Disdain
for “Augustus” and “Gretchen” is forgotten and
respect for
love is restored to him.
207
Thus our author has connected the treatment
of the delusion and the breaking forth of the desire
for love most closely with one another, and prepared
the outcome in a love-affair as necessary.
He knows the nature of the delusion even better
than his critics; he knows that a component of
amorous desire has combined with a component
of resistance in the formation of the delusion,
and
he has the girl who undertakes the cure discover in
Hanold’s delusion the component
referring to her.
Only this insight can make her decide to devote
herself to treating him, only
the certainty of
knowing herself loved by him can move her to
confess to him her love. The
treatment consists
in restoring to him, from without, the repressed
memories which he cannot
release from within; it
would be ineffective if the therapeutist did not
consider the emotions;
and the interpretation of
the delusion would not finally be: “See; all that
means only that you
love me.”
The procedure which our author has his Zoë
follow for the cure of the delusion of the friend
of
her youth, shows a considerable resemblance,
no, complete agreement, essentially, with a
therapeutic
method which Dr. J. Breuer and the present
writer introduced into medicine in
1895, and to the
perfection of which the latter has since devoted
himself. This method of
treatment, first called
the “cathartic” by Breuer, which the present
writer has preferred to
designate as “analytic,”
consists in rather forcibly bringing into the consciousness
of the
patients who suffer from disturbances
analogous to Hanold’s delusion, the
unconscious,
208
through the repression of which they
have become ill, just as Gradiva does with the
repressed
memories of their childhood relations.
To be sure, accomplishment of this task is easier
for
Gradiva than for the physician; she is, in this
connection, in a position which might be called
ideal from many view-points. The physician who
does not fathom his patient in advance, and
does
not possess within himself, as conscious memory,
what is working in the patient as
unconscious,
must call to his aid a complicated technique in
order to overcome this
disadvantage. He must
learn to gather with absolute certainty, from the
patient’s conscious
ideas and statements, the repressed
material in him, to guess the unconscious,
when it betrays
itself behind the patient’s conscious
expressions and acts. The latter then does
something
similar to what Norbert Hanold did
at the end of the story, when he re-translates the
name,
Gradiva, into Bertgang. The disturbance
disappears then by being traced back to its origin;
analysis brings cure at the same time.
The similarity between the procedure of Gradiva
and the analytic method of psychotherapy is,
however, not limited to these two points, making
the repressed conscious, and the concurrence
of
explanation and cure. It extends itself to what
proves the essential of the whole change, the
awakening of the emotions. Every disturbance
analogous to Hanold’s delusion, which in
science
we usually designate as a psychoneurosis, has, as
a preliminary, the repression of part
of the emotional
life, to speak boldly, of the sex-impulse, and
at every attempt to introduce the
unconscious and
repressed cause of illness into consciousness, the
emotional component
209
necessarily awakens to
renewed struggle with the forces repressing it, to
adjust itself for final
result, often under violent
manifestations of reaction. In reawakening, in
consciousness, of
repressed love, the process of
recuperation is accomplished when we sum up
all the various
components of sex-impulse as
“love,” and this reawakening is irremissible, for
the symptoms
on account of which the treatment
was undertaken are nothing but the precipitations
of former
struggles of repression and recurrence
and can be solved and washed away only
by a new high-
tide of these very passions. Every
psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt to free
repressed love,
which has formed a miserable
compromise-outlet in a symptom. Yes, the conformity
with the
therapeutic process pictured by
the author in Gradiva reaches its height when we
add that even
in analytical psychotherapy the
reawakened passion, whether love or hate, chooses
the person
of the physician as its object every time.
Then, of course, appear the differences which make the case of Gradiva an ideal one such as
the technique of physicians cannot attain. Gradiva
can respond to the love which is pushing
through
from the unconscious into the conscious; the
physician cannot; Gradiva was herself the
object
of the former repressed love; her person offers at
once a desirable object to the freed
erotic activity.
The physician has been a stranger, and after the
cure must try to become a
stranger again; often
he does not know how to advise the cured patient
to apply in life her
regained capacity for love.
To suggest what resources and makeshifts the
physician then
210
employs to approach with more or
less success the model of a love-cure which our
author has
drawn for us, would carry us too far
away from our present task.
Now, however, the last question which we have
already evaded answering several times. Our
views about repression, the formation of delusion
and related disturbances, the formation and
interpretation
of dreams, the rôle of erotic life, and the
manner of cure for such disturbances
are, of
course, not by any means the common property
of science, to say nothing of being the
possession of
educated people. If the insight which makes our
author able to create his “Fancy”
in such a way
that we can analyse it like a real history of disease
has for its foundation the
above-mentioned knowledge,
we should like to find out the source of it.
One of the circle who,
as was explained at the
beginning, was interested in the dreams of Gradiva
and their possible
interpretation, put the direct
question to Wilhelm Jensen, whether any such
similar theories of
science had been known to
him. Our author answered, as was to be expected,
in the negative,
and rather testily. His imagination
had put into his mind the Gradiva in whom
he had his joy;
any one whom she did not please
might leave her alone. He did not suspect how
much she had
pleased the readers.
It is easily possible that our author’s rejection
does not stop at that. Perhaps he denies
knowledge
of the rules which we have shown that he
follows, and disavows all the intentions
which we
recognized in his production; I do not consider
this improbable; then, however, only
211
two possibilities
remain. Either we have presented a true
caricature of interpretation, by
transferring to a
harmless work of art tendencies of which its creator
had no idea, and have
thereby shown again how
easy it is to find what one seeks and what one
is engrossed with, a
possibility of which most
strange examples are recorded in the history of
literature. Every
reader may now decide for
himself whether he cares to accept such an explanation;
we, of
course, hold fast to the other,
still remaining view. We think that our author
needed to know
nothing of such rules and intentions,
so that he may disavow them in good faith,
and that we
have surely found nothing in his
romance which was not contained in it. We are
probably
drawing from the same source, working
over the same material, each of us with a different
method, and agreement in results seems to vouch
for the fact that both have worked correctly.
Our procedure consists of the conscious observation
of abnormal psychic processes in others,
in
order to be able to discover and express their laws.
Our author proceeds in another way; he
directs
his attention to the unconscious in his own psyche,
listens to its possibilities of
development and
grants them artistic expression, instead of suppressing
them with conscious
critique. Thus he
learns from himself what we learn from others,
what laws the activity of this
unconscious must
follow, but he does not need to express these laws,
need not even recognize
them clearly; they are, as
a result of his intelligent patience, contained incarnate
in his
creatures. We unfold these laws by
analysis of his fiction as we discover them from
cases of
212
real illness, but the conclusion seems
irrefutable, that either both (our author, as well as
the
physician) have misunderstood the unconscious
in the same way or we have both understood it
correctly. This conclusion is very valuable for
us; for its sake, it was worth while for us to
investigate
the representation of the formation and cure
of delusion, as well as the dreams, in
Jensen’s
Gradiva by the methods of therapeutic psychoanalysis.
We have reached the end. An observant reader
might remind us that, at the beginning, we had
remarked that dreams are wishes represented as
fulfilled and that we still owe the proof of it.
Well,
we reply, our arguments might well show how
unjustifiable it would be to wish to cover
the
explanations which we have to give of the dream
with the formula that the dream is a wish-
fulfilment;
but the assertion stands, and is also easy
to demonstrate for the dreams in Gradiva.
The
latent dream-thoughts—we know now what is
meant by that—may be of numerous kinds;
in
Gradiva they are day-remnants, thoughts which
are left over unheard, and not disposed of by
the
psychic activity of waking life. In order that a
dream may originate from them the co-
operation
of a—generally unconscious—wish is required;
this establishes the motive power for
the dream-formation;
the day-remnants give the material for
it. In Norbert Hanold’s first dream
two wishes
concur in producing the dream, one capable of
consciousness, the other, of course,
belonging to
the unconscious, and active because of repression.
This was the wish,
213
comprehensible to every archæologist,
to have been an eye-witness of that
catastrophe of 79.
What sacrifice would be too
great, for an antiquarian, to realize this wish
otherwise than
through dreams! The other wish
and dream-maker is of an erotic nature: to be
present when the
beloved lies down to sleep, to
express it crudely. It is the rejection of this
which makes the
dream an anxiety-dream. Less
striking are, perhaps, the impelling wishes of the
second dream,
but if we recall its interpretation,
we shall not hesitate to pronounce it also erotic.
The wish to
be captured by the beloved, to yield
and surrender to her, as it may be construed
behind the
lizard-catching, has really a passive
masochistic character. On the next day the
dreamer strikes
the beloved, as if under the sway
of the antagonistic, erotic force; but we must
stop or we may
forget that Hanold and Gradiva
are only creatures of our author.

THE END

Printed in Great Britain by

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOXING AND LONDON

[Footnotes]

[1] Freud, Traumdeutung, 1900 (Leipzig and Wien, 1911), translated

by A. A.
Brill, M.D., Ph.B. Interpretation of Dreams, George
Allen and Unwin, Ltd.,
1913.
[2] The case N.H. would have to be designated as hysterical, not
paranoiac
delusion. The marks of paranoia are lacking here.
[3] See the important work by E. Bleuler, Affektivität, Suggestibilität,
Paranoia,
translated by Dr. Charles Ricksher in N. Y.
State Hospitals Bulletin, Feb.,
1912, and Die diagnostischen Assoziationsstudien
by C. Jung, both Zürich,
1906.
[4] Cf. Freud: Sammlung der kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre,
1906.
Translated in part by A. A. Brill, M.D., Ph.B. Nervous
and Mental Diseases
Monograph Series No. 4. Selected Papers on
Hysteria and other
Psychoneuroses. N. Y., 1912.
[5] Cf. Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse, 1905.
[6] Cf. Breuer u. Freud, Studien, über Hysterie, 1905. Leipzig
and Wien,
translated by A. A. Brill, M.D., Ph.B. Nervous and
Mental Diseases
Monograph Series No. 4. Selected Papers on
Hysteria and other