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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.)