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.)
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 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, 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 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?
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 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 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 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, 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: