It is my purpose to bring also our beautiful literature to the solution of the exceedingly difficult and obscure problem of sleep walking and moon walking. Our poets, for all our psychiatrists and psychologists, possess the finest knowledge of the psyche and during the centuries before science was able to throw light upon the puzzles of the mind, they solved them prophetically with discerning spirit. Thus they knew how to bring to light various elements of our problem. Their creations directed to that end arose from their own inner nature, through analogy, or because sleep walking was not foreign to them themselves. And even if neither were the case, they still had the ability of those who have a real true knowledge of men, quite intuitively to see clearly into the unconscious of others. We will come to know what profound interest many of the great poets, like Otto Ludwig and Heinrich von Kleist took in night wandering and moon walking and how they have first introduced these dark problems into other traditional material. A striking similarity is revealed if one compares that which the poet has in mind with that which I have been able to report in the medical section. I shall be able satisfactorily to verify the statement that science and art have reached exactly the same result. First however I will present the examples from the poets according to their comprehensibility and their transparency. I begin with

“AebelÖ,” by Sophus Michaelis.

Twice had Soelver drawn near to the maiden Gro, daughter of his neighbor, Sten Basse. The first time was when in the spring he visited the island Aebeloe, which belonged to him but was quite uninhabited. So bright the day and so warm the kiss of the sun upon him, yet suddenly it was “as if his bare neck were flooded by a still warmer wave of light.” A maiden stood before him, “who was like pure light. The eyes were as if without pupils, without a glance; as she looked it was as if white clouds floated forth out of a heavenly blue background. Soelver sprang up and stood face to face before her. Her cheeks grew red. Although unknown to each other, they smiled one at the other like two seraphim. Her hands opened toward his and before her, as out of her lap, fell the flowers which she had gathered. Soelver believed for a moment that it was all a dream. He swung his hands into the air and a hand waved toward him. He closed his eyes that he might enjoy to the full the soft, fleeting impression. It floated over his hand like an incorporeal breath. Was it then a ghostly vision, that wandered there at his side!” When however he knew that the maiden near him was a living being, then “his lips sank toward her trembling with desire, unintentionally and yet irrevocably.” At this moment a “cloud passed over the sun and the light became at once dulled as if a mist had fallen upon all the flowers. Of all this he did not become so quickly aware, as that his own cheeks resounded from a whizzing blow.” Her face glowed bright with anger and the delicate blue veins were swollen on her forehead, while with a scornful look she turned her back to him. His blood was however aflame with desire for revenge.

A second time had the young nobleman Soelver sought to satisfy his masculine passion, when he surprised Gro bathing upon Aebeloe. She however had defended her maidenhood and struck him about the head with an old, rusty sword, which she found on the shore, so that he sank upon the grass covered with blood. “He felt the pain of his wounds with a strange glow of pleasure. The blow had fallen upon the hard flint stone within him so that the sparks of passion had sprung forth. He loved the maiden Gro. A consuming passion raged in his blood. In his thoughts he knelt always before that ineffaceable image, which struck him to the earth with a flame of divine wrath in her eyes.” In revenge for the trespass committed Sten Basse fell upon Soelver's castle and took the young nobleman himself prisoner.

Wild violence of this sort was indeed familiar to Sten Basse. He himself had once taken his wife thus by force. Just as he was flattering himself that he had broken her will once for all, she bit him in his chin so that the blood gushed forth and she spit his own blood into his eyes. He was struck with admiration at such strength. He had thought to desert her at once. Now he lifted her in his arms, carried her from her father's castle into the stable, bound her to his horse and rode forth—to his own home. Their marriage had been at first a long series of repetitions of the first encounter. In the end she loved him as the horse loves the iron bit between his teeth and the spur in his flank. She did not allow herself to be subdued by the blows which he gave her, but she was the weaker and she loved him because he was strong enough to be the stronger. An evil fate had taken his sons from him one after the other. Therefore he wished to call forth in his only daughter the traits of his own blood, his pride, disdainfulness and stiff-neckedness. “She must know neither fear nor weakness; her will must be hardened and her courage steeled like that of a man. When he heard that his daughter had been in danger but had saved herself, he swore revenge to the perpetrator of the outrage, yet at the same time his heart laughed with pride at Gro's fearlessness. He took the young nobleman prisoner and rewarded him with heavy and tedious torture as penance for his insolence. Yet at the same time he delighted himself with the thought of putting his daughter to a still more dangerous proof. He wished to see the young-blooded, inexperienced birds reach out swinging and scratching in attack and defense.”

As if in mockery he gave to the imprisoned youth the passionately desired Gro to be with him in the dungeon. “She stood there as if she had glided into his prison by the flood of light entering in and he trembled lest the light would again absorb her into itself.” He knew not what power forced him to his knees and threw him at her feet with a prayer for forgiveness. She had however merely a scornful laugh for the man humbling himself in his love and the cruelly abusive word, “Creeping worm!” Then in his sense of affront there comes the thought that Gro was given into his power. While he tried the walls of his dungeon to ascertain if he was perhaps watched, Gro stood and stared out by the aperture through which the light entered, now paler than before. Soelver stepped near her, drew the single gold ring from his finger, which had come down to him through many generations of his forefathers, and extended it to her as a bridal gift. But she threw it unhesitatingly out through the peephole.

Now bitterness raged in Soelver's blood. “He bowed himself before her face in order to intercept her gaze, but he did not meet it though her eyes were directed toward his. It was indeed no glance but a depth into which the whole light of day, which was blue now without overhead, was drawn down into a deep well. Soelver became intoxicated with this light, which, as it were, appeared to seek her alone and threw an aureole of intangible beauty about her form.” He crept up and pushed forward the wooden shutter, then carried Gro to his cot. “She had let herself go without resistance and fell lifelessly with her arms hanging down. Soelver laid his face close to hers. His breath was eager, his blood was on fire and in his fierce wrath he intended to yield himself to the boiling heat of sensual passion. Her cheeks however, her skin, her lips were cold as those of death. He began nevertheless wildly to kiss her face, once and again, as if to waken warmth and life in the cold skin. Yet with every kiss it was as if she grew more fixed, as if the lips shriveled and grew cold and damp as ice over the teeth. The cold from this embrace crept over Soelver, and drew the heat and fervor from his nerves, until he shook suddenly with the cold and shuddered with the thought that he had a corpse under him. Yet in that selfsame moment he marked the rising of her breast as she drew in her breath, full of strength with all its coldness, so full of strength that it pushed Soelver away and he slipped down to the hard flags of the floor.

“Soelver lay upon the floor, congealed with a coldness which was stronger than that of the hard tiles. It was as dark as in a walled-in grave. He dared not move however for fear that he would again feel that ice cold body. ‘Hear me,’ sounded suddenly a strangely shrill whisper, ‘hear me, if you are a man, let me get out! Call my father! I want to get out—make light—give me air—I am almost choking—I want to get out!’” As Soelver opened the shutter again so that the dim shadowy glow of the night could enter, he saw Gro “tall and slender in the pale light.” “Let me out, let me out!” she begged. “I am afraid here below—not of you—but of myself and of the dark—let me out!” “For the first time Soelver heard a soft rhythm in this voice smooth as steel. A soft breath breathed itself in her entreaty. He became a man, a protector and felt his power grow through her supplication.”

Yet though he exerted himself to the utmost to open the door of his dungeon, it was all in vain. It must have been fastened on the outside with massive oak or iron bars. “So finally he gave up entirely and turned back to the opening where the light came in. Gro had sunk down under the last bit of light, without complaint, without sound. Her eyes were closed, she leaned her head against the sharp edge of the aperture and her arms hung down lifelessly. Soelver bent over her; her breath was almost inaudible, but irregular and did not suggest sleep. Like a thirsty plant she stretched herself out of the single airhole of the dungeon that she might seize the last drop of light before the darkness extinguished everything. Soelver divined that she could not be brought away from this aperture for light.” He brought all the skins from the couch, spread them over her, pushed them under her body and “solicitously, with infinite carefulness he protected her from the damp floor, while he shoved his arm under her for support without ever touching her with his hand. All his brutality was gone, all his burning passion. Here she lay before him like a delicate sick flower, which must be covered over from the cold of night.”

When Soelver awoke the next morning he noticed that one of his hands was seized by her, grasped in the unconsciousness of sleep and held fast by her long, slender fingers, which clasped themselves about his hand. It was as if her soul clung to him in sleep as helper and savior from him himself, from his own brutal savagery. When Gro however opened her eyes and stared into Soelver's face, lit up by the sun, she broke out into weeping which could not be stilled. “She was terrified at awaking in a cellar hole, into the close damp darkness of which she looked, while the face of her vanquisher blazed strong in the sunlight before her; she wept without understanding or comprehending anything of what had happened about her.” Perplexed, Soelver bent over her hand and kissed it. Then came Sten Basse and saw how uncontrollably Gro sobbed. “If you have gone near my daughter,” he hissed at the young nobleman, “there will be no punishment strong enough for you.” At this there shot up in Soelver a wild lust for revenge and he answered his enemy with irritating coldness: “Yes, I took what you gave. You brought her yourself into my presence, you laid her yourself in my arms. Now you may take her back again. I spurn your daughter for I have not desired her for the honor and keeping of my house, but only for the entertainment of a night. Take her back now! Take her back!”

Nevertheless better treatment was from this time on accorded Soelver, which he never for a moment doubted he owed to Gro. As he dwelt in his cell upon his phantasies, he suddenly heard her voice singing that melancholy song of Sir Tidemand, who tried to lure the maiden Blidelille into his boat by vigorous runes written upon roses. Blidelille awoke at midnight and knew not what it was that compelled her.

In vain the foster mother bids them spread velvets and satins over her that she might sleep. Notwithstanding she arises suddenly, dresses herself and goes down to the strand to Sir Tidemand, who meets her scornfully. Then she goes into the lake, whither Tidemand follows her, seized with heartfelt remorse.

The woful song trailed itself through Soelver's mind like an indistinct dream. Then he believed that he distinguished Gro's step, until it was lost in her sleeping room. With his mental vision he saw the maiden, as she looked out upon the lake toward Aebeloe. She looked away from him, of whose fate she took no thought, but gazed fixedly over the sea, which bore upon its bosom a ship with silken sails, on whose deck Sir Tidemand stood. “Then Soelver was conscious of an infinite weakness in his love toward this pure maiden, whom his coarseness had taken into his arms, his desire had scorched with its hot breath but who had nevertheless left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro into his hands.”

Day and night Soelver's thoughts tarried only with Gro. In his phantasies “he forced himself through the bolted door, climbed sharp angled passage ways and winding staircases and lifted oaken beams from barred doors. Without once making a mistake, driven by a magic sense of direction, he finally reached Gro's couch, at which he saw himself staring with great white eyes, whose pupils in the darkness of sleep had as it were glided over to the side. And upon the cover of her couch lay her two gleaming arms and the fingers of the right hand trembled as if they grasped another invisible hand. In this room Soelver remained until her sleep drew him to itself, until the heaving of her breasts drew him down, until her fingers entwined themselves with his, until their breath mingled and his lids closed before her pure gaze.”

Another time he dreamed that he was upon a vessel, evidently in the rÔle of Sir Tidemand. And Gro actually came over the water to him like the maiden Blidelille, “with roses like two blood spots upon her breast. She had crossed her hands beneath them and fastened her pure gaze upon Soelver, so that he was seized with terror and, without escaping her look, fled to the lee of the vessel to the edge of the ship. Yet Gro steadily drew nearer. Now she reached the ship's border and Soelver retreated. Step by step she followed him, the painful gaze of her deathly white face absorbed by his own. And he withdrew over to the other border, drew back until he felt the railing hard behind him. Gro stepped forward alone and it was not possible to stop her; he felt as if she wished to press within him like the sped arrow to its goal. Finally, in an instant, as her garment fluttered against him, he threw himself with a loud cry to one side and saw, with a great horror, that Gro went forward, through the railing as through air and disappeared on the other side in the sea, while Soelver lay moaning upon the deck and saw before him only the red roses, which fallen from her breast crept like living blood over the ship's planks.”

Was it dream or reality, which he saw when he opened his eyes? “The sun's rays burst forth through a crack in a long, radiant arrow, which bored itself into the floor and transfixed as it were something red that began to glow.” And as Soelver crept nearer his astonishment grew deeper. “For hard by the vision of red were footprints breathed so to speak upon the floor, fine, slender prints, directed toward him, no more distinct than if a warm breeze had blown away the dampness from the surface of a stone, leaving the outline of a foot fixed there.” As he now stooped down and with his hand felt for the blood red spot, his fingers actually touched “a heavy full-blown rose, whose sweet strong odor he drank as if in an intoxication of reality.” No one had forced his way in through the hatchway, of this he soon convinced himself. Gro must have dropped it here while he was spinning dreams about her.

In the nights which followed “he slept in a kind of hunger to feel her physically and tangibly in his arms.” Then when it was again full moon, he found on awaking, in a spot upon which fell the rays of moonlight, a little gold cross, “whose six polished stones seemed to radiate moonlight from themselves. It was as if the moonlight lay within his hand. He watched the small cross sparkle—it was the same that he had seen in dreams upon her rose wreath. Gro had been also within his prison.”

He was led out soon after this to be shown to the monk, who had come to obtain news of his imprisonment. “In the doorway the young nobleman met Gro and drew back, so strong a power seemed to irradiate from her living form. She stood in the half twilight, with her white hands and her white neck and forehead, which shone as with their own light from out her coal black velvet robe. There was a blinding, marvelous reality about her, which drew him like a great fragrant flower.” As the monk expressed his compassion for him, that imprisonment had befallen him, his pride of nobility awoke. “What do you say of imprisonment and ill foreboding? Know you not then that I am of my free will Sten Basse's guest?” This reply astonished even Sten Basse. “He admired the young, undaunted spirit, who found in himself no occasion for pity. Soelver stood before Gro, his arms firm at his sides, and breathed deep and strong. His eyes drank in the clear light from her hands and face.” When however Sten Basse sought to approach him in a friendly manner, Soelver motioned him back: “As prisoner was I led forth, as prisoner I return of my free will. If you wish to make any apology to me, you know where my dungeon is to be found.” Then he went quickly, without turning toward Gro, out of the hall and down into his prison. His senses nevertheless had seized that warm, radiant picture of the beautiful Gro and transplanted it to the midst of his cell. He saw it streaming before his eyes in the shimmering light of the cross of moonlight and longed for the clear light of the night, that he might go on and make the dream face live. When the darkness advanced “he stripped himself naked and allowed the air of the summer night to cool his limbs and purify them, before he betook himself to his cot. The small cross he laid upon his naked breast and watched the moonlight glimmer green and blue from every stone” and kissed it thinking of Gro. Then he fell asleep in blissful happiness.

Suddenly however he awoke without any apparent reason, from no dream or thought. “He was awake, collected and yet at the same time strangely under the control of something that lay outside himself, a strange unknown power, which might be either mystical or natural. It appeared to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the moon and now floated about in the room like a living being. So real seemed this fancy to him that he turned his head to one side and was not astonished actually to see a form standing in the center of the darkness. A feeling of reverence and awe swept over Soelver as little by little he distinguished in the floating folds of the moon white garment, the firm outlines of a woman's arms, which were crossed beneath a half bared breast, the line of the teeth in the open mouth, a flash of white light from Gro's eyes gazing with a certain fixed power.

“Holy Mother of God—it was Gro herself!“Soelver started upright, frightened at his own movement, for he scarcely dared breathe, much less go towards her. He felt his nakedness as a crime, even his being awake as a transgression. The form glided forward out of the moonlight, the crossed hands separated themselves from the breast and Gro pursued her way with outstretched hands, feeling her way and yet mechanically sure like a sleep walker.

“Yes, she was walking in her sleep. Soelver recognized it by the staring look in her eyes, which gazed through the night as through miles of space. Soelver slid noiselessly to the floor in front of her, afraid that he would be seen, in deadly terror lest she should awaken. For he knew how dreadful it might be to awaken a sleep walker and in his excited phantasy he heard already the cry of horror and madness which would issue from Gro's mouth if she awoke and saw herself in this dark, subterranean depth alone with a naked man as with a demon. It was as if everything in Soelver cried out in protective anxiety that Gro should not awaken. He crouched beseechingly upon the ground, his whole soul was a sobbing prayer for grace, for instant means of deliverance, now that Gro had come to him as if by fate.

“There came a whispered sound from her open mouth, as her lips for a moment sought each other. It was as if she breathed out the one word ‘Soelver.’ This, however, to hear his name spoken, made Soelver strong at once. It compelled him to arise from the floor, it banished fear from his soul, it made him rejoice in every fiber of his being. The next moment her outstretched arm reached his hand—he felt the firm, cool skin under his trembling finger tips and his face felt the warm breathing of her voice, ‘Soelver, Soelver!’ And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvelous single purpose, which must be attained. This whole transformation took place in him merely because he felt that this was the only means of saving her from awaking to consciousness and madness.

“‘Soelver—Soelver!’—‘Yes.’—‘Soelver—are you—are you—there?’—‘Yes—I—am—here.’—‘Yes—that is you—that is you—I feel you.’—‘And you see me?’—‘Yes, I see you.’—‘And you will stay with me?’—‘Yes—I will—I will stay with you.’“Soelver answered her in the same whisperings in which she breathed out her words. His hands passed over hers with infinite carefulness. But finally his arms closed about her neck and he felt a marvelous tingling in his finger tips as he touched her soft silken hair. His mouth approached hers and mingled his warm breath with the breath which escaped cold from her lips. He drew in the air with her own rhythm, it was as if his naked heart bowed toward hers so that they all at once touched one another. Then the blood flamed out of her cheeks and streamed over into his, although they lay not upon each other. The blood burned in all her skin and Soelver trembled for a moment lest this transport was the beginning of the awakening.

“His heart stood still with fear. However the blood continued to surge through Gro's body. She pressed Soelver close to herself and through her soft clothing he felt her breast swell and throb, as if she would bore herself into his flesh. ‘Soelver—I love you.’—‘Gro—I love you.’ Then a strange giddiness seized him as if he were rushing into her arms on a tower miles high. He breathed upon her ethereal kisses, which closed her lips, moistened her forehead and descended thence like a refreshing spring rain so that her lids drooped. When her eyes were closed Soelver felt for the first time quite secure. He fastened them with a real kiss and now, since her sleep wandering had reached its goal in his arms and Soelver was sure that her love dream was too deep to be disturbed, he whispered louder than before, ‘Gro—I love you!’—‘Soelver—I love you!’—‘How long have you loved me?’—‘Longer than I have known you, Soelver.’—‘Why have you not said so, Gro?’—‘That, Soelver, I will never tell!’

“So Soelver carried his wonderful burden to his couch and inhaled her youthful fragrance and lifted his mouth to hers and all his blood at once leaped forth. Every fiber of his being was stirred to kisses, every blood drop became a yearning mouth to meet the thousand mouths of her blood. And lost to sense—vehemently, seized by the divine power of nature, unafraid that she might awaken, without control over himself and yet proud as a master of worlds, he was impelled as the sunbeam to its goal, when it forces open the flower and buries itself in its fragrant depths. Soelver united himself with Gro. She on her part slumbered on, quiet as the sea which has closed over its sacrifice.

“But Soelver felt his senses reawakening. What now? Should he let Gro sleep until day woke her and she saw herself in his arms? He bent over his beloved in deepest distress. She must not awaken in terror, not again weep as on that first morning when she was with him. The most delicate chords in her soul had trembled and sung to him in the night, to him whom she unconsciously loved with all the indefinable conviction of her heart. This love must not be rudely plucked and allowed to fade like a plant whose tender shoot is torn asunder. She must go back to her maiden's couch until the flower of the day had burst forth from its leafy covering. Then he discovered that the panel at the foot of his cot was opened, while some planking had been pushed back. Gro must have come this way and by this way he carried her back. Led by an unerring instinct, as if he knew from his nightly phantasied visits all the turnings of the way, he went without deliberation into the secret room behind the panel, found the passage to the main stairway, passed straight up, turned through corridors, passed under the heavy tapestry curtains, opened the last door and noticed first that he bore a burden when he laid it down. The moon threw its faint silver light round about in the little room. With a sweet wonder Soelver gazed upon the prayer stool and the brown rosary—without its cross.”

I may pass briefly over the remainder. In the first place Soelver was given his liberty and he went back to his castle. The death of Sten Basse occurred soon after. Soelver whispered to his daughter at his death bed, “Gro, whatever may happen, know now that we belong to one another.” She “turned her head slowly toward him and looked at him with her large eyes swollen with tears. Her look was that of a stranger and quite uncomprehending, so that Soelver understood that she did not simply deny everything but she had no recollection at all.” So Soelver turned and went. For the first time when bathing in the lake “he found again his youth and his freedom, his radiant hope and the jubilant certainty of his love. Gro loved him! Only the thought of love had not yet arisen from the depths of her soul like pearls to the light. Nevertheless the wonderful flower of her affection was growing in the golden light of dreams. He longed after Gro as after his bride, although he was only the bridegroom of her dreams, who dared to kiss her only when her eyes were closed. By day he was her foe, as the bear in the fairy tale, who by night alone is changed into a beautiful young man.”

They met therefore first again at Sten's bier, at the side of which they both kneeled. “Gro's eyes were directed upon him as upon a stranger, staring with wonder, burning with a mystic light. Why was this stranger here near her, the man whom her dead father had tortured and derided? And yet her eyes were wet with tears of pity and she felt that this man only desired to take her hand. Soelver observed her with his inmost soul. He pressed the small cross of moonshine between his hands, he bent over it and kissed it and a gleam from its blazing stones smote Gro's eyes. She stretched out her arms and took the cross from him and gazed into the stones as into well-known eyes. She knew not how this had come into Soelver's hands but she also bent over it and kissed it and her soul went out toward Soelver as toward a soul far, far away, whom she once had known, whom however she could scarcely remember.”

After this Soelver came and went at Egenaes, Sten Basse's castle, as if he were lord and heir of the estate. “It was rumored also among the tenants and the servants that he was betrothed to the maiden Gro. Yet no word of it was exchanged between them. Soelver stood by Gro in small things and great, and she allowed herself to be guided by his strength and cleverness. Since that night when he had kneeled with her at her father's lifeless body, she was bound to him by a nameless bond of gratitude, of mutual feeling, and by an inner apprehension that their fate was interwoven. Still no consciousness of love colored Gro's attitude. She longed for Soelver's strong handclasp because it made her will strong to withstand her sorrow. She could think of herself lying upon his broad, deep breast, only however because there slumber would come in sure forgetfulness. There was moreover a tenderness in her look, when in a fleeting moment she let her glance rest upon his, such as the realization of another's goodness awakens in us, especially when the goodness is undeserved and disinterested. Yet there was never any of love's surrender. Only she was glad to know herself observed by these quiet, steadfast, clear eyes, from which the red specter of passion, which had so frightened her that day upon Aebeloe, had long been banished. She believed that she had in Soelver a friend given her for life and death, a friend who could not desire her in love nor be desired, a brother whom one might trust with infinitely more serenity than any lover.

“Soelver was ever watchful of Gro. His eyes were on the lookout whether he might not once surprise in hers the brightness of the dream, and make the hidden rose of love break through the green covering and bloom in reality. He longed thus within himself once to see the day and night aspects of her soul melt into a wonderful golden twilight. But Gro made no response to the gaze from his eyes. She turned her head aside so that her silken lashes concealed her glance. ‘Gro, why do you never look at me?’—‘I do look at you.’—‘Do you see me with your cheek, Gro?’—‘I see you, though, Soelver. I see you with the outermost corner of my eye.’ Soelver bent his face beneath hers. ‘Are you looking at me?’ But Gro pressed her lids together as before a bright light and shook her head, ‘No, Soelver, not so! You look too sharply, you look too deeply. You look so deeply that it hurts me very much. No, stand so Soelver, turn your eyes away!’—‘Are you afraid of me?’—‘No, no—why should I be afraid? But I do not feel comfortable to have you all the time wanting to read my heart, to have your eyes searching for some writing that does not stand written there. My friend and beloved brother, I fear what your look would draw from me—what would you drag out from my soul?’—‘The spring day, Gro, when we first met.’—‘Ah! Soelver, I scarcely remember it. It seems to me that I have always known you, that all your days you have been good and kind to me. Lately I have felt it in my heart and upon my cheek, as when my mother caressed me and that is long, long ago.’—‘Gro, only say it, you are afraid of the word, but not truly—just say it—you love me.—You are silent because it is true.’ ‘No, Soelver, I have never felt that.’—‘So you have dreamed it, Gro.’—‘Dreamed!’ Gro became fiery red. ‘Dreamed—dreamed—oh Soelver, what have I dreamed? What do you know of my dreams? To have dreamed is to have dreamed, and my dreams belong to me, to me alone!’ For a moment she turned to him a shy, quivering look, then tears trickled down from under her drooping lids. But Soelver observed that he had hit upon the truth. Immediately however he regretted that he had cast this look into the sanctuary of her soul. It was like the curious peeping of which the knight had been guilty, spying through the keyhole upon his wife, Undine.

“A long time they sat silent. At last Gro was herself again, quiet and controlled. Then she spoke in a soft but firm voice, ‘Soelver, if you remain with me to awaken me to love, then I beg of you, go and never return. I can never look upon you with the eyes of love. Passion seems to me like a glowing sword, which burns out one's eyes as it goes by. There was a day when you made the flaming sword of your desire pass by my face—since that time it is burned out. I have been blinded, Soelver, I am blind to the desire of your eyes, and all your fervent prayers. I have hated you, despised you, defied you, yet you have repaid evil with good and now I return good for good. Look not upon me with love's eyes, seek not to awaken the dead in me to life. You are to me more precious than if the proud brother of my childhood had returned in you, your spirit is his, I did not believe that in the will of a man so much kindness could dwell. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother, or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks for I know no reply.’”

The young nobleman knew finally, for all his eager power, no other way of escape than to go with the king to the war. He saw quite clearly that “Gro struggled against the force deep in her heart. And yet the day's flaming sun could cause the weak chrysalis of the dream to shrivel so that no butterfly would break through the covering and rejoice in the strong light of midday. But with Soelver away, the longing for him would support the invisible growth of the dream and prepare the way for it into consciousness. Ah! it was worth his departure.” Then he took leave of his beloved. “Goodbye; forget me not on our island. Bid me return when you will. The wind will find me, wherever I am. Tell the wild birds, when you want me and would call me home.”

Gro, remaining behind alone, first became aware what she had lost in him and in his “strong will, which was her source of light.” She began to long more and more for him who was far away. “Ah, if he would only come again!” And when a bird flew by, she “flushed red at her own thought; was that a message sent forth by her desire? This took place contrary to her wish and will—she wished not to long for him, not to call him back, not to love him! Angrily she roused herself and sought to recall the burning gaze with which Soelver had wounded her modesty. So with a vexed and hard stroke of the oars she pushed the boat away from Aebeloe.”

When the war was ended, Soelver went to serve the king of France. For, as he wrote in a letter sent by carrier pigeon, “he who is not summoned, comes not.” Meanwhile love towards the young nobleman had begun to grow in her bosom. “Night after night she dreamed of Soelver and at last one night she suddenly awoke and found herself cold and naked, wandering around in her room and heard the last note of her heart's unconscious avowal, ‘Soelver, I love you.’ There was a change within her. Hour after hour would she sit inactive and half asleep, listening to the irregular beating of her heart—something was drawing upon her very depths, sucking her strength from her, from her proud will, something that paralyzed her thought and bound her always to the same name, the same memory.” As she listened to her own depths, “she caught a momentary something like a weak, quickly beating echo of her own slow heart, a busily living little heart, that ticked louder and louder until at last it deafened hers. A trembling joy seized her at that moment through all her senses as she knew that she bore a life within her life, that she enclosed in her body the germ of a new life that was not growing from her alone and of her life alone.”

Suddenly a crushing terror overcame her. Who was her child's father? “So abruptly came this question over her naÏve soul that she fancied for a moment that this might be the punishment of fate for her longing for Soelver. This longing was desire, and desire was sin no less than the love itself. Her wish for him had grown to a fire in her blood and now she was stained by her own passion, pregnant from her own sin. God's punishment had visited her and soon would be visible to all the world. Gro saw however immediately the foolishness of her thought. For one moment she lingered at the thought of the one woman of all the earth, who had immaculately conceived. Then she uttered an inward prayer that the Mother of God would lighten her understanding and give her clearness of vision that she should not go astray in her brooding over this mystery.”

When she questioned her nurse and the latter finally put it to her, “Have you spent no night under the same roof with Soelver?” then there occurred to her the many nights “when she had dreamed of the lonely imprisoned man, who was being punished because of her. When she lay in her bed in the dark, a strange curiosity had overcome her to imagine his lot there below and, when sleep seized her and dreams chased away the bitter, hard thoughts, her heart had become softer and the sun had shone over the visions of her dreams as the spring day over the woods blossoming with the green May bells. Many a night and many a morning was she awakened by a strange burning desire in her thoughts, and her mouth was as though touched with fresh dream kisses, and she had entered into judgment with her own weak heart and had so inflamed herself to scorn and hatred that she had done nothing to soften the fate of the prisoner. But how could Soelver have been the guest of her dreams? And how had he been able to command the virgin love fed by her slumber? Then came the nurse to her aid and made it clear to her. She knew that the maiden Gro had walked in her sleep; the servants had told of a white ghost on the stairs and once she herself had seen it and recognized Gro, who had disappeared upon a secret stairway, which led down into the dungeon. She had kept still about it, for she thought it was a voluntary sleep walking to the young nobleman.”

Thus was Gro enlightened as to the source of her pregnancy. “She quivered with shame that the desire in her dreams had the power to drive her down to the lonely prisoner and she shook in her inmost soul at the memory of that happy dream, which she had had the night before her father's death. Now her love suddenly burst into the light like a wonderful flower, which suddenly springs up with a thousand fragrant buds. Now it was impossible to stem it or to conceal it. She had wanted to suppress every germ, with her father's coldness and the day's dispassionately proud haughtiness she had been willing to stifle every impulse toward love, every longing for self avowal. Now she found her pride was dead and buried and her being within and without was permeated by love.

“For she had loved Soelver from the first springtime kiss, which he had imprinted upon her cheek as she wandered among the fresh May bells, loved him in the blow which she had inflicted upon his head when he had touched her chaste nakedness, loved him in those nights when he had slept uncomplaining in the cellar dungeon, loved him in those bitter moments of his humbling when he, in spite of scorn and insult, maintained his pride, loved him that evening when he kneeled at her father's bier and kissed the hand of his enemy now dead, loved him day by day all the time they were together, loved him in that hour when she saw his banner disappear among the hundred others, and today upon Aebeloe when she heard that new life singing within hers. And now she rejoiced; for she bore him always within her, she could never again lose her Soelver.”

As we glance over the material of this tale, we find as the nucleus of the night wandering and moon walking the strong repression of every conscious love impulse and the breaking through of the unconscious in sleep and dream wherever the censor's rule is relaxed. For the maiden Gro had loved Soelver from the first moment, yet this love was confessed only in moments of occasional self forgetfulness, as by the first meeting with the young nobleman, when her hand met his, yes, even pressed it for the moment. Only Gro should not have been frightened out of her half unconscious action by a kiss or a passionate desire, for at once there arose to life within her the coldness and haughtiness of her father and the highhanded reaction which her mother had manifested to her conqueror. The determining factor, to speak in psychoanalytic language, is the struggle between the strong sexual rejection and the equally compelling sexual desire. At first the former held the upper hand with our heroine in her waking and conscious action, the latter in the unconscious. Through the force of her will Gro seemed cold, even as she had learned of her father. She defended herself from her lover's craving by force and blow; even when conquered finally through the noble spirit of her enemy, she would see in him only the friend for life and death. She directly refused to think of love and displaced it to external things, she even bade the young man go rather than desire her as his wife. Soelver's devotion reminded her most significantly of her mother's tenderness, his pride, of the brother of her childhood. “It is as if in you the proud brother of my childhood had returned. Your spirit is his. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks, for I know no reply!”

Yet she avoided Soelver's searching eye and as he reminded her of her dreams, she was smitten in the depths of her soul. For her dreams, she well knew, chased away the bitter and hard thoughts, the repressed unconscious broke through and the true feeling of her loving heart. This already appeared clear to her when her beloved languished in captivity at her father's hands. The strange desire to work out the fate of the young nobleman, who suffered on her account, had overcome her lying there in her bed in the dark. And in the morning she awoke with a strange burning desire in her thoughts and her mouth was flecked with his fresh dream kisses. Still she consciously kept back every outer manifestation of love and met the young man while her father was alive with coldness and suspicion and later even merely as a brother. The great distance separating her beloved from her and above all the child which she bore from him under her heart for the first time conquer her haughty pride and her conscious aversion. And as she dreams one night again of the loved one far away she finds herself suddenly awake, going about cold and naked in her room and perceives as the lingering sound of her heart's unconscious avowal, “Soelver, I love you!”

So severe is this struggle between conscious sexual denial and unconscious desire, that it even forces itself through in her sleep and her night wandering. Her dreams had indeed, as she later acknowledged with shame, the force and the power to compel her below into the young nobleman's dungeon. She had clasped Soelver's hand in her sleep, she had told him everything in the moonlight, with eyes closed, everything which she secretly felt, and had pressed him to herself. Yet when he asked her why she could never confess to him that she had always loved him so deeply, she repulsed him: “That I will never tell!” Even when he had united himself to his beloved, she had slumbered on as if nothing had happened and the next day knew nothing of it all.

This leads now to that which, according to folk belief, constitutes the very core, the chief ground for sleep walking and moon walking in a maiden. It is easy to understand the wish, on the part of the female sex with their strongly demanded sexual repression, to come to the beloved one and taste all the delights of satisfaction but without guilt. This is possible only through wandering in unconscious sleep. For, as my first patient explained, one is not accountable for anything that happens in this state, and thus can enjoy without sin and without consciousness of what is not permitted. Convention demands that the maiden wait until the lover approaches her, but in that unconscious state she may surrender herself. The need for repression explains then the subsequent amnesia. Yet wandering by night is not concerned merely with sexual enjoyment, over and above that it fulfills a second desire that arises out of childhood, as we know from psychoanalysis. Every small maiden has, that is, the wish to have a child by her father, her first love, which is often in later years defined thus, one might have a child, but without a husband. The night wandering fulfills this desire to have a child yet without sin. Therefore has that motive of an unconscious, not to say immaculate, conception inspired not a few poets, as it has already, as is well known, been active in the creation of the drama.

Less transparent than that chief motive is the action of the light, sunlight as well as moonlight. The heroine of the story stands toward both in a special relationship. Her body is almost illuminated by its own light, her hair sparkles electrically when it is touched, “warm waves of light” emanate from her, which Soelver noticed at their first meeting, the sun seems expressly to seek her, a halo of impalpable beauty surrounds her and above all glows from the depths of her eyes. Not only so, Gro seems to dwell chiefly in the light, whose last drops she greedily absorbs within herself. When the light fades, her body becomes cold as ice like a corpse. In similar manner the shining of the full moon affects her, the light of which the stones of her gold cross have absorbed. The first time that the slumbering youth saw Gro wandering, it seemed to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the planet and floated only in his room like a living being. The poet, to be sure, has offered no explanation of this mystical effect of light and what the reader may think for himself would be merely drawn from other sources. For this reason I will not pursue this point further.

The narrative affords somewhat further means for an understanding in another direction. It is not explained more fully just why Gro follows the sunlight and moonlight or why both exercise upon her a peculiar attraction, yet the tendency to a motor breaking through of the unconscious may be derived from an inherited disposition. The father is a rough, violent robber knight while the mother shows distinctly sadistic traits and a truly ready hand at fighting. That confirms what I explained in the first part, a heightened muscular excitability and muscle eroticism, which strives to break through again on the sexual side in sleep walking. Finally it may be affirmed without doubt that the ghostly white figure upon the stairs was no other than the maiden in her shift.

“JÖrn Uhl,” by Gustav Frenssen.

I can deal more briefly with “JÖrn Uhl,” the well-known rural romance of Frenssen, in which the sketch of a moon walker constitutes merely an episode. Joern Uhl, who, returned from the war, takes over the farm of his unfortunate father, discovers Lena Tarn as the head maid-servant. She pleased him at first sight. “She was large and strong and stately in her walk. Besides her face was fresh with color, white and red, her hair golden and slightly wavy. He thought he had never seen so fresh and at the same time so goodly appearing a girl. He was pleased also at the way she nodded to him and said ‘good evening’ and looked him over from head to foot with such open curiosity and sincere friendliness.” She sings too much to please the old housekeeper! “She is so pert and too straightforward with her speech.” It is noteworthy too that she talks to herself in unquiet sleep.

Lena Tarn can soon make observations also upon her side. Joern was very short with the old graybeard, who advised him to an early marriage: “The housekeeper is with me, I do not need a wife.” Lena, entering just then, heard what the unmannerly countryman said and assumed a proud look, thinking to herself, “What is the sly old man saying!” Since however the old man began to talk and compelled her and Joern Uhl to listen, she was concerned almost entirely for the latter, whose “long, quiet face with its deep discerning eyes she observed with a silent wonder, without shyness, but with confident curiosity.” Not alone in the kitchen, which is under her control, can Lena show what is in her. When a young bull broke loose and came after the women, she met him with sparkling eyes, “Stop you wretch!” When he would not allow himself to be turned aside, she threw a swift look flashing with anger upon the men, who were idly looking on, then swung the three-legged milking stool which she had taken along and hit the bull so forcibly on the head with it that frightened, he lunged off sideways. “Lena Tarn had however all afternoon a red glow coming and going in her cheeks because the farmer had looked upon her with the eyes of a high and mighty young man. That caused her secretly both joy and concern.” Immediately after this she experienced one satisfaction. Joern Uhl was dragged into the water by a mischievous calf and was much worse cut up by it than she, the weaker one, the woman had been.

“Lena saw always before her the face which Joern Uhl had made when she had gone forward against the bull. She was otherwise in the best of humors, but when, as in the last few days, she was not quite well physically she was inclined to be angry. She preserved a gloomy countenance as well and as long as she could. Soon though, as she went here and there about her work and felt the new fresh health streaming through her limbs, she altered her looks.… Joern Uhl moreover could not be quiet that day. The sudden plunge in the water had brought his blood to boiling. The spring sunshine did its part. A holiday spirit came over him and he thought that he would go into the village and pay his taxes, which were due. On the way he thought of Lena Tarn. Her hair is coiled upon her head like a helmet of burnished brass, which slips into her neck. When she ‘does things,’ as she says, her eyes are stern and directed eagerly upon her work. When on the other hand she is spoken to and speaks with any one she is quick to laugh. Work seems to her the only field where quiet earnestness is in place. ‘That must be so,’ she says. Toward everything else she is angry or in a good humor, mostly the latter. Only toward me is she short and often spiteful. It has been a great joke for her that I had the ill luck to have to go into the water with that stupid beast. If she only dared she would spread it three times a day on my bread and butter and say ‘There you have it.’”

Now he meets old Dreier who gives him good advice: “How old are you? Twenty-four? Don't you marry, Joern. On no account. That would be the stupidest thing that you could do. I bet you $50.000 you don't dare do it. Time will tell, I say.” “Take it for granted that I will wait yet ten years,” he answered. And he went on thinking to himself, “It is pleasanter to go thus alone and let one's thoughts run on. Marry? Marry now? I will be on my guard. After I am thirty!” Then his thought came back to Lena. “She looked well as she flung the stool at the bull. Prancing like a three-year-old horse. Yesterday she did not look so well, her eyes were not so bright, she spoke harshly to Wieten (the old housekeeper) and said to her afterwards, ‘Do not mind it, Wieten, I slept badly,’ and laughed. Funny thing, slept badly? When one is on the go as she must be all day, one should sleep like a log. But that is all right in the May days. It is well that men understand this, otherwise every spring the world would go all to pieces.” Then he rejoiced that he was so young and could point out on the farm what was his. “Later, when the years have gone by and I am well established I will take to myself a fine wife with money and golden hair. There are also rich girls who are as merry and fresh and as desirable and have as stately forms. It need not be just this one.”

Then he came to the parish clerk who had just been notified that day of six children to be baptized and who was complaining of the increase in births. Joern agreed with him: “What will we come to, if the folk increase like that? Marrying before twenty-five must simply be forbidden.” “With these words he departed, filled with a proud consciousness that he was of the same opinion with so intelligent, experienced an old man as the parish clerk.” At home he met Lena Tarn with an old farmer, who came to inquire after the fate of his son who had been with Joern in the war. Then for the first time the girl heard of the frightful misery and the suffering of the soldiers which cried to heaven, so that her face was drawn with pain. “Deep in her soul however thrilled and laughed a secret joy, that you have come back whole, Joern Uhl.”

Later, when she was making out the butter account with the farmer, “she had to bend her glowing head over the book, which he held in his hand. There came such a glistening in his eyes that he wrinkled his forehead and did not conceal his displeasure at such an unsteady flashing.” In the evening she came to get back the book. Then Joern spoke to her, “You have not been in a good humor these last days. Is anything the matter?” She threw her head back and said shortly, “Something is the matter sometimes with one; but it soon passes over.”—“As I came through the passage yesterday evening I heard you call out in your sleep in your room.” “Oh, well!… I have not been well.”—“What … you not well? The moon has done that. It has been shining into your room.”—“I say, though, there may be some other cause for that.”—“I say that comes from the moon.” She looked at him angrily, “As if you knew everything! I did not call out in my sleep at all but was wide awake. Three calves had broken out and were frisking around in the grass. I saw them clearly in the moonlight. I called them.” He laughed mockingly, “Those certainly were moon calves.” “So? I believe not. For I brought them in myself this morning and then I saw that the stable door stood open. I thought to myself, the boy has gone courting tonight. Your eyes always sweep over everything and light upon everything and you [du] worry so over everything out of order, I wonder that you [du] have not seen it.”—“You say ‘thou’ [du] to me?”—“Yes, you say it to me. I am almost as great as you and you are not a count, and I am as intelligent as you.” She carried her head pretty high and as she snatched the book from the window seat as if it lay there in the fire, he saw the splendid scorn in her eyes. “Take care of yourself when the moon is shining,” he said, “otherwise again tonight you will have to guard the calves.”

“He had arisen, but dared not touch her. They looked at one another however and each knew how it stood with the other. He had again the look which he had revealed once in the morning, a presuming look, confident of victory, such a look as if he would say, ‘I know well enough how such a maidenly scorn is to be interpreted.’ But her eyes said, ‘I am too proud to love you.’ She went slowly into the darkness of her room as if she would give him time yet to say something or to long after her. He was however too slow for that and laughed in confusion.”

The night fell upon them, a wonderful still night. “I will take one more look at the moon,” thought Joern Uhl and took his telescope. He went through the middle door with as little noise as possible, but the door of Lena's room stood open and she appeared upon the threshold and leaned against the side post. “Are you still awake?” he asked anxiously. “It is not yet late.”—“The sky is so clear. I want to look at the stars once more. If you wish you may come with me.” At first she remained standing, then he heard her coming after him. When he had directed his telescope to a nebulous star he invited her to look in. She placed herself so awkwardly that he laid his hand on her shoulder and asked her, “What do you see?”—“Oh!” she said, “I see—I see—a large farmhouse, which is burning. It has a thatched roof. Oh!—Everything is burning; the roof is all in flames. Sparks are flying about. It is really an old Ditmarsh farmhouse.”—“No, my girl, you have too much imagination, which is bad for science.—What else do you see?”—“I see—I see—at one side of the farmhouse a plank which is dark; for the burning house is behind it. But I can look deep into the burning hall. Three, four sheaves have fallen from the loft and lie burning on the blazing floor. Oh, how frightful that is! Show me another house which is not burning.—Show me a house, you know, show me a farmyard just where they are who hunt up the calves.” He laughed merrily. “You huzzy,” said he, “you might well see your three-legged stool in the sky, not? So, high overhead!”—“You should have had the three-legged stool. I do not forget you that day, you … and how you looked at me. That you may believe.”

He had never yet let anyone share in his observations. Now he marveled and was pleased at her astonishment and joy. And then he showed her the moon. He placed her and held her again by the arm as if she were an awkward child. She was astonished at the masses on it: “What are those? Boiling things, like in our copper kettles? Exactly. What if it hung brightly scoured over our fireplace and tomorrow morning the fire shone up upon it.”—“The boiling things are mountains and valleys.—And now you have seen enough and spoken wisely enough. Go inside. You will be cold and then you will dream again and see in the dream I do not know what. Will you be able to sleep?”—“I will try.” He wanted again to reach out his hand to her but his high respect for her held him back. He thought he should not grasp her thus, along the way as it were. “Make haste,” he said, “to get away.”

She went and he remained to pursue his studies. So the time passed. He had grown eager and busied himself noiselessly with his telescope. “And he thrust aside once more that young life, which an hour ago had breathed so very near him and came again to the old beaten track of thought that the old Dreier was right. ‘Don't do anything foolish, Joern.’—And yet, ‘Fine she is and good. Happy the man about whose neck her arms lie.—What precious treasure must those eyes hold, when they can look with such frank confidence at a man.’”About him now were only the customary sounds of night. Suddenly it was as if near by over the house roof and then at the side at the wall of the house he heard the soft cry of a goose and the weak flapping of wings. And “as he looked, there stood under the house roof in the bright moonlight a white human form, with one hand over the eyes and with the other feeling along the wall, as if it would enter the house where there was however no door. It spoke in excited hurried words, ‘The calves are in the garden; you must be more on the watch. Get up Joern and help me.’ Joern Uhl came in three long strides over the turf and softly called her name: ‘I am here.—Here I stand.—It is I.—So! so!—Now be still.—It is I.—No one else is here.’ She was speechless and began to rub her eyes with the back of her hand, as a child rubs the sleep out of its eyes, and she fretted also in childish fashion. Then he embraced her and told her again where she was, and led her to the stable door seeking to comfort her. ‘Look, here is the door of the stable. Here you have gone through, you dreamer; you have gone all through the stable in your sleep. Have you been seeking the moon calves? Ah you foolish child!—So, here you need not be anxious. You will straightway be back in your room.’ When she finally clearly recognized her situation, she was frightened, flung her hands against her face and uttered mournful cries. ‘Oh, oh, how frightful this is!’ But he caressed her, took her hands from her face and said to her feelingly, ‘Now stop that complaining. Let it be as it is.’ So they came to the open door, which led to her room. It must have been a remarkable night, for not only had half the calves in the pasture broken out and in the morning were actually standing in the garden and the court, but the boy this night of all nights had not come home, but only returned in the early morning twilight.”

The next morning Joern Uhl went to the parish clerk that the banns might be published for him and the nineteen year old Lena Tarn. He was almost embarrassed when he came again before her, “I should merely like to know what you think of me.” As she remained speechless, he came nearer. “You have always been a great heroine, especially to me. Hold your head high and make it known that I am right.” She was still silent, merely pressed both hands to her temples and stared into the glowing hearth. Then he drew one of her hands down softly from her hair, seized it and went with her over the vestibule, through the door communicating with the front of the house. She followed him passively, her eyes upon the ground and the other hand still on her hair. In the living room he led her to the large chair which stood by the window and forced her into it. “So,” said he softly, “here we are all alone, Lena. Here in this chair has Mother sat many a Sunday afternoon. You now belong in it.” Still she said nothing. “I have been to the parish clerk and arranged everything and the wedding will be in June. Have you nothing to say yet?” Then she seized his hands and said softly, “As you think, it is all good so.” And she covered her face with her hands and wept. Then he began to stroke her and kiss her. “Child, only cease your weeping. You are my fair little bride. Only be happy again.” And in his distress he said, “I will never do it again. Only laugh again.” At last when he could think of no more cajoling names, he called her “Redhead.” Then she had to laugh, for that was the name of the best cow, which stood first in the stalls. Now she lifted her head and gazed long at him without moving. Thus Joern Uhl came rightly to that tenderness and comfort which he thought he deserved.

I have only a little to add that is important for our theme. As a young wife also Lena Tarn was busy the whole day, working from early to late without rest. The work flew from her hand. And when her confinement was over, she got up the sixth day, against the earnest warning of the housekeeper, cared for her boy alone the whole day, went even to the kitchen and carried water for his bath. Joern Uhl allowed it. For he was proud to have such a strong wife, “not so affected as the others.” It led however to her death. Somehow she must have become infected, for soon after a severe childbed fever broke out.

Even as a young wife she, the poor humble cottager's daughter whose childhood was pinched by bitterest need, shed a wealth of love and joy upon all who dwelt about her. Yet now, “she, the friendly one, who had never caused suffering to any one, went in her fever delirium to every one in the house, even the smallest servant boy and to every neighbor and begged their forgiveness, ‘if I have done anything to hurt you in any way.’ Towards morning she became quieter but it was the exhaustion of death and she spoke with great difficulty. Her husband must ‘tell Father that she had loved him.’ Joern Uhl sobbed violently: ‘Who has never spoken a kind word to you, poor child.’ She tried to smile. ‘You have had nothing but toil and work,’ he said. Then she made him understand in labored speech that she had been very happy.” The last fever phantasies finally put her back into her childhood. Her love went out to the old teacher Karstensen, then again to Joern Uhl, until she was finally led through angels to a further father-incarnation, to the dear God. “It came to her like peace and strength. Clasped by many hands and led forward, she came to an earnest, holy form who leaned forward and looked kindly upon her. Then she stretched her hand out and suddenly she had a great bunch of glowing red flowers in her hand. She gave them to him saying, ‘That is all that I have. I pray you let me remain with you. I am fearfully weary. Afterwards I will work as hard as I can. If you would like to hear it, I will gladly sing at my work.’”

Scarcely in any other tale is the fierce strife between the clearly active sexual longing, and the conscious sexual denial present at the same time, as well as the final victory which the unconscious attains, so plainly shown as in Gustav Frenssen's romance, where the moon walking, exhibitionistic woman completely overthrows the reasoning of the man. The poet expresses it clearly and decisively: They each knew the desire of the other. Joern Uhl saw through the meaning of a maiden's scorn and Lena's eyes said, I am too proud to love you, but I do love you. Yet opportunity must be given to the unconscious to break through victoriously so that the inhibiting reason shall be deprived of its power. Therefore the powerful increase of libido with the woman during the occurrence of menstruation and through the wooing of the boy, who lets the calves break out, in the man through the cold bath and furthermore in both through the seductive May air. Finally the moon acts directly with its light as a precipitating cause.

The night before she had spoken out loud in her sleep just as Joern Uhl went by to his room. He had spoken of it directly as the action of the moonlight, which she of course contradicted; she had been lying awake and heard the calves break out.[19] Then she takes the following night, when the housekeeper, with whom she slept, was sitting up nursing an old farmer and the boy had gone courting again, to approach Joern Uhl on her part as a moon walker, who knew nothing of what she did and could not be held responsible. More than this her unconscious had a fitting speech ready, the calves had broken out again.

The breaking through of the motor impulse is also well grounded. Everything with Lena Tarn is joy in muscular activity, the restless, almost unappeasable desire for work and pleasurable “getting things done,” “exerting herself,” the constant singing, the easy giving way to anger. Work is the only thing which she can carry on earnestly because in that she lives out in part her sexuality, she meets every one else smilingly or angrily according to her mood. It is noteworthy too that her unquiet libido transforms itself toward Joern Uhl into anger and animosity and so much so that once in anger she addresses him as “thou” and acts as if she were his beloved.

One thing is especially evident in this example of sleep walking and moon walking, the invariably infantile bearing of these phenomena. When Lena, walking in her sleep, was called by her lover, she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand as a child rubs the sleep from its eyelids and fretted also in childish fashion. Then again there is her strange behavior when Joern announces that he has arranged for the publishing of the banns. The farmer had in a significant way put her literally into the mother's place and then in the same manner shown tenderness toward her, stroking and caressing her, as he himself had once been treated by his mother. Still Lena, who already in the night responded to the sudden realization of her position with the cry, “Oh, oh, how frightful this is!” cannot yet quiet herself. It is hardly to be believed that a farm maiden would so lose control of herself at the thought of an illegitimate relationship, which furthermore was to be immediately legalized by marriage. Many things however point to this—I mention only her later fever phantasies—that she always felt inwardly guilty because she had been untrue to some one else, the first beloved of her childhood, her own father. Only when Joern Uhl on his part becomes a child and in his way solemnly declares, “I will never do it again,” and in the end names her “Redhead,” apparently a pet name of her parent, then she has to laugh and looks long at him without moving, wondering perhaps if he is the real father. After this everything falls into proper place. I can now somewhat extend the statement at the beginning of this section. Night wandering and moon walking have not only inner connections with the infantile but more exactly with the infantile erotic.

I will briefly mention still one circumstance in conclusion. The influence of the moonlight is but little touched upon in our tale. Joern Uhl speaks of it only once. There is on the contrary a connection with actual occurrences, a recent cause for Lena's moon walking. She has looked at the moon through the lover's telescope and received instruction in regard to it. That wakens the memory of the instruction of the old Karstensen, her teacher when she attended the folk school, from which we understand that he appears in the place of her father.

“Maria,” by Otto Ludwig.

Perhaps no poet has felt so deeply and expressed so clearly what constitutes the fundamental problem of sleep walking and moon walking as Otto Ludwig in his youthful novel “Maria.” This novel has, according to a letter from the poet, “sprung from the anecdote of the rich young linen draper, who was passionately roused to commit an unnatural offence at sight of the landlord's daughter laid out apparently dead in the room through which he was conducted to his own. As a result of this, when he put up there years after, he found her, whom he supposed to have been buried, a mother, who had no knowledge as to who was her child's father.”

This anecdote, which he learned from a friend, took such a hold upon him that he immediately wrote down not only what he had heard but the first plan, although upon the insistent protestation of that friend he did not work out the story as it had been first conceived nor so glaringly. “I saw,” writes our poet, “at first only the psychological interest in this material. The problem was to present the story as well as possible and this was indeed a significant one for the narrator. A distinctly esthetic interest would not be possible in conjunction with that.”

There is no doubt in the mind of the experienced psychoanalyst that, when a poet is laid hold of in this manner by an anecdote, this only happens because his own significant infantile complexes are roused out of the unconscious. Also the transformations, not unworthy of consideration, which the poet makes with the story are highly indicative. The seemingly dead maiden becomes a moon walker, the landlord's daughter is changed to the attractive daughter of a pastor. “Out of the linen draper there is finally made a cultivated, artistically sensitive youth, who has in him much of Ludwig's own personality” (Borcherdt). The finished romance the poet considered the best which he had so far created, it came nearest to his ideal of a story. Although his attempts always failed to find a publisher for the “Maria,” the poet retained his love for this work all his life and it was one of the few productions of his youth which he occasionally still shared with his friends in his last years. The theme of “Maria” is, as indeed the significant title represents, the unconscious, not to say, the immaculate conception. It is unconscious because the heroine, drawn by the moon and walking in her sleep, comes to her beloved and becomes pregnant by him without a conscious memory of the experience. Furthermore the analogy with the Mother of God becomes emphasized by the fact that in a picture “Mary and Magdalene” described at the beginning, the Queen of Heaven bears quite unmistakably the features of the heroine of the title. The main event, with its results and discovery, is developed out of the character of both hero and heroine with extraordinary psychical keenness.

Eisener like Maria is the only child of rich parents. For both love manifests itself for the most part rather unfortunately. Apparently neither gets on well with the father and both have early lost their mothers. Only Eisener even yet clings with deepest veneration to the mother who taught him to revere all women and, judging from his words, her influence upon her husband and the son's desire still appears. “Whatever of good there is in me, I owe to women. The thought of my excellent mother restrained me from many an indiscretion, as also the teaching and the example of the wisest and best of men (the father). This gentle power which is so sweet to obey and at the same time so full of reward! In loving surrender it obeys the man, while its divine power rules the man without his knowing it. The imperceptible but mighty influence of her gentle presence has determined his decision before he has comprehended it. It has fallen upon him in his anger like an angel before his own strength could arm itself, it has turned him to what is right and proper before he is conscious of the choice. Before her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the penitent. These are the suns about which the planets of greatness, honor and beauty revolve, lighted and warmed by them.” Maria's mother on the other hand is not praised by a single syllable. We do not discover when she died nor how old the little one was when she lost her natural protectress. Only indirectly can one make conjectures in regard to this peculiarly important point.

Maria was from an early age a marvelous child. “She spoke a language of her own, which only the initiated or a very poetic person could understand. All lifeless things lived for her; she transferred to flowers, trees, buildings, yes, even furniture and clothing the feelings of a human soul. She mixed sense impressions in her speech in the strangest fashion, so that she asserted of tones that they looked red or blue, and inversely of the colors that they sounded cheerful or sad. A girl a few years older than she named her the blue song.” Both phenomena, the attributing of life to inanimate things, to which one speaks as to beloved human beings, as well as the phenomenon of synesthesia, color audition and seeing of tone colors, are as we know positively today, to be referred back to erotic motives.[20]

“With Maria's seventh year perhaps, the tendency to play and purposeless dreaming, which is always bound with such lively, mobile phantasy, gave place, to the astonishment of all, to an exactly opposite tendency. From this time she began to take root in life with all the intensity of her nature. Already in her twelfth or thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the admiration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accompany everything which she undertook; everything increased under her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar element was reality.”

What had produced this sudden turn about? I cannot escape the conjecture that here the death of her mother had a decisive influence and with it the necessity to take the place with her father of his wife. Her housewifely activity is noted first to be sure from her twelfth or thirteenth year. Yet I am of the opinion that she had already in her seventh year begun to play this rÔle—in which year the death of her mother would be placed—only because she was too small it had been under the eye of a maid or housekeeper. My analyses of hysterics has taught me that so profound and sudden a transformation of the whole character always takes place upon definite erotic grounds and for a quite definite erotic purpose.

The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often hear it from the child's lips, “You know, Papa, when Mama dies then I will marry you.” That is in the childish sense meant quite properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in years she is yet a mere child. She is altogether the mother in the care of a boy outside the family and this, as he quite rightly remarked, laughing boisterously and heartily, even where it is not necessary. Thus her first thought, when she spends her first night banished from home, is of “the poor father, who must go to bed without the little services to which he is so accustomed.”

She possesses a maturity in the management of the household which few elders have. Everything goes on and is done without any one noticing that it is being done. “Is there anything more charming than this sixteen year old little house mother in her housekeeping activities?” says one of her admirers. “Just look, let her do what she will, she accomplishes it in the best way and at the same time most beautifully.” She is quite contented in the position which she has made. Her eroticism seems completely satisfied. “She is psychically yet so little a woman that there is not the least sexual inclination in the charm that infuses her and therefore her bodily development is overlooked. There is also no trace yet of that entrancing shyness which springs from the mere suspicion that there must be something else about the man.” A friend of the family expresses it thus: “When one considers the repose, the self possession of her nature, the freedom from constraint and the spirituality of it, one might almost believe that she was not originally of this earth but perhaps a native of the moon, which seems to exercise more influence upon her than the earth.” Every trace of dreamy maiden phantasies, which represent nothing but unconscious love desires, was wanting in her. What she formerly possessed of these was now completely bound with her care of the father. Her erotic nature is for the time satisfied and needs nothing more to veil it and has nothing to wish for. Therefore she has on the one hand kept childhood's clearness of vision, before which there can be no deceit, on the other hand unbroken contentment with herself and all the world as well as the capacity to forgive immediately every wrong suffered. According to the picture drawn by the poet of the passionate nature of the father, which is capable of hurrying him, the pastor, into reviling God, it seems to me plain why Maria, if she suffered wrong, “is distressed merely over the remorse which the other one, she knows, must feel, when he has finally come to an insight and to reflection.” This is nothing else than the father's voice, who had once done wrong to his child and had in a later searching of heart repented of it. Maria, with such early satisfaction of her feelings of love begged “even as a child for nothing which the parents had to refuse her. If she had any need it was to be busy, to take care of the order and the nourishment of the house, the satisfaction and welfare of the inmates. Where she could love, she was happy and at home. Yet even the love for her father never proclaimed itself passionately but always rather in unwearied attention and concern for his smallest need, which only she might suspect as well as for that which manifested itself actively.” For herself she scarcely had any wants. A piece of bread and two apples satisfied her as her day's nourishment, which is typical for the hysteric anorexia and perhaps merely signifies the unconscious wish to cost the father as little as possible. Just one single characteristic was wanting for her perfection, the soft, clinging, typically feminine characteristic. This also becomes understandable when one considers that all eroticism toward the father is inhibited in its sexual goal, and may manifest itself only intellectually on account of the incest barrier, at least as far as it comes into consciousness.

The womanly within her shall nevertheless find release through the young Eisener. I have mentioned above how he hung upon his mother. As the early inclination of the small maiden is generally toward the father, so the first love of the boy is for the mother. It is she who teaches him to love and to seek the woman of his heart according to her own image. Later, just before puberty we might say, the boy becomes acquainted with the secrets of sexual life, then, clinging to certain impulses of his childhood, he begins to desire the mother also in the newly acquired sense, while he begins to hate the father as a favored rival, who stands in the way of this wish, and develops a conscious antagonism toward him. He falls, as we say, under the domination of the Œdipus complex. Yet the wishes toward the mother go as a rule no further, since meanwhile the incest barrier has already for a long time been erected. Through this the boy is compelled to submit the mother complex to a splitting. For a moment the phantasy may come to him that the mother shall conduct him into the sexual life—a feature not wanting in any youth—but it is now decidedly rejected or more typically displaced upon those women who make of love a profession and actually take care to initiate the youth into the sexual life. For this reason the remainder of the mother complex is idealized and the mother transformed to a pure virgin woman, toward whom no man dares direct his desire. Similarly is it with the loved one, whom one chooses after the pattern of the mother.

So Eisener expresses himself warmly. “Maria is not made for love, only for reverence.”

Yet without the child's craving for the mother[21] he would not have become a compulsive neurotic,[22] with all the hypermorality of the latter, pride in his moral purity and extravagant self reproaches, even a lustful self laceration after he had at one single time been overpowered by sensuality. Furthermore his lack of resoluteness, decisiveness and courage is not, as he mentions, the result of his myopia but of his neurosis. He has developed himself, out of an unconscious rivalry, in direct contrast to his intensely narrow-minded father. The latter was only a tradesman, who set his comfort above everything, for whom art had value only in so far as it increased his own enjoyment of life. So painting becomes the son's chief delight in spite of his exaggerated myopia or perhaps just on account of it. He bore his father's tyranny with difficulty[23] and with inner protest. His tendency toward the free kingdom of art stood in contrast to him, and in the same way he sought on the other hand a substitute for the mother in every woman. He offered up for his sin the dreams of his youth when he first believed that his moral nature was stained and became as a result, as even the elder feels uneasily, an over obedient son.How had this so easily befallen him with a mother so deeply honored! Around her spun all the boy's love desire and twined itself about her, and all that lava heated feeling belonging so peculiarly to the child alone. He had hung upon that idol the longing of his heart, the phantasies of a power of imagination lustfully excited, which is not indeed wanting in the best of children, although commonly these are inhibited, and later even completely forgotten because of restraining moral impulses. Therefore the memory of the highly honored mother is awakened not only through Maria, the pure one, but also through Julie, who comes into contact with his sensual desire and the unclean childish phantasies slumbering in the last analysis behind this. It is interesting how strikingly the poet is able to point out that double emotion in Eisener's soul.

There the moral restraining impulses were first crowded back by the wine plentifully pressed upon him, which he, accustomed from his early years to moderation, could tolerate in only the smallest amount. Now “the sly Julie seemed to him ever more charming. A play of glances began between the two, which appeared to make the young hunter jealous. On the other hand Eisener himself felt something similar when his neighbor on the left addressed to the earnest Maria words which did not conceal the liking she had inspired. He listened to her replies almost with fear and was delighted that there was not audible in them the least response to this inclination, and then he wondered at himself over this same division in his nature. In Julie's dark eyes glowed a flame, of which he felt how it kindled him and that its fire must attract more and more to itself without his being able to defend himself from it, yes, without his wishing to be able to do it.” To be sure when “the slender Maria stood like a holy picture behind Julie, the alluring child of the world with all her seductive graces sank low in value in contrast to the former. He felt the need to be open with himself.” Transparency was a necessity to him from his youth, as an inheritance from his wise mother. “Then Breitung thrust with his glass against Eisener's refilled one. Laughing and drinking he found the motley interchange of the liveliest ideas outwardly, which already had taken the place of quiet thought, soon becoming less and less menacing and finally even agreeable and desirable.”

His sexual excitement, heightened besides through the plentiful indulgence in alcohol and the general boisterousness, was brought to a high pitch by an episode with the passionate Julie. Eisener had to leave the room with her during a social game. “A strange thing happened to him, for as he bent down in the adjoining room in the dark to the quick breathing Julie, instead of her ear her burning mouth met his mouth, and the soft pulsating form fell as if fainting into his arms. Wrestling with himself, striving to keep his senses, he seized her arm involuntarily and stood again with her in the assembly room before he was conscious what it was all about.”

Is not this behavior of the youth burning with desire peculiarly strange? What if behind it there is fixed a memory perhaps of a scene with the mother, who brought him to his senses by seizing his arm? Yet, it might always be so for him, he had found the power once more to withstand the hot temptation. Not to be sure without subsequent regret. For when he later sought his room he could not go to sleep and “his phantasy conjured up again, as often as he resisted it, that dark room about him and the bewitching Julie in his arms. He regretted a thousand times, so much did he distress himself, his joy at his instinctive flight, that he had not drunk that sweet poison to the full, whose mere touch had brought his whole being to this feverish pulsation.”

He sought now to find cooling for his heated blood in the garden, and in fact the fragrance of the flowers and the rustling of the leaves so soothed his excited mind that gradually the sense of a pleasant languor came over him. In a half unconsciousness he went upstairs again and back to bed. He was just falling asleep when he saw a white form enter, whose features he could not make out because of his shortsightedness. As it disrobed and came toward him, he first, as if seeking for help, reached with his hands toward the side where his friend should be sleeping. He did not however find him, he apparently had been put into another room. “The thought of being alone for the first time with a womanly being in the security of night crept over him at first like icecold drops, then like the glow of fire over all his nerves. His heart pounded audibly as the figure climbed into his bed. The strangeness and adventure of the situation was not fitted to work rationally upon the intoxicated man, whose excitement throbbed into his finger tips. The power of the warning inner voice disappeared with his reason and the strife was brief before nature came off conqueror.”

I have before this sketched Maria's character development up to the time when Eisener came into her life. Yet one point may be added. She had retained one single influence from her childhood in spite of all change in her seventh year, which “with the beginning of maturity appeared only occasionally and as it were in secret. The moon had been her dearly beloved and her desire; as a small child she had been able to look at the moon for hours without intermission. If she was sick her mother or nurse must carry her to the window through which she might look upon the friend of her small soul.” About half a year before her acquaintance with Eisener “the moon had made its influence felt upon her sleep, as it had before affected her waking. At the time of the full moon she often left her couch, dressed herself and went up into the corner room in the pavilion. Here she stood for some time and turned her closed eyes toward the moon. Then she dropped the curtain, undressed and lay down in the bed, which stood in the spot where she had been used to sleep as a child. As soon as the moon had left the windows of this room or shone through the windows of her present sleeping room, she arose again, dressed herself and returned. She herself knew nothing of these wanderings, and whatever was done to awaken her during them was in vain. The physician thought that these attacks of moon walking would disappear finally when maturity was established, or at least at her first confinement.”

In this picture from a layman are some new and striking features. First is the love—one can call it nothing else—which the child bestows upon the planet. Why is the moon her beloved and her desire from childhood up, why can she stand by the hour looking at it, why does she long when sick to be laid so that she can look at it all the time? He who observes children knows that such extreme love, which endures for years without wearying of it, and finally that ability to stare steadily at the moon, must have a sexual content, although naturally no one will admit this. Only when the object, in our case the heavenly body, is sexually stimulating is the love for it enduring for all time, undergoing no change, no abatement of feeling for it. As Maria's erotism later found satisfaction in her father, her love toward the moon steadily receded. But at the entrance upon puberty her sexual impulse increased and she began to wander in the moonlight. The love finally which Eisener inspires in her, together with the strong sexual excitement, which the fÊte the day before had called forth in her, occasions again an attack, in which she surrenders herself willingly to the beloved.

The folk, like the family physician, have not a doubt of the sexual basis of the moon mania with her as with individuals in general. When puberty is established or she has a child of her own the attacks will cease, is the opinion of the latter. The servant maid Grete also, a living book of fairy tales among her people, explains the moon wandering as nothing else than the result of an unsatisfied sense desire. There was a young knight who had wooed a rich woman of gentle birth. Shortly before midnight they were both led into the bridal chamber. “Yet hardly were they alone together when a strange voice outside before the castle called, ‘Conrad, come down here! Conrad, come down here!’ And again it called, ‘Conrad, come down here!’ The voice sounded so plaintive and at the same time so threatening. The bridegroom said, ‘That is my best friend; he is in need and calls me.’ The maiden said however, ‘The voice belongs to my cousin, who was found dead two years ago.’ Then she shuddered so that the gooseflesh stood up over her whole body,” and she implored her bridegroom not to follow the evil spirit or at least to remain with her until the ghostly hour was past and the full moon was up. But he would not be restrained: “Be it an evil spirit or a good, no one shall call me in vain!” “And he went out. The lady went to the window but could see nothing for the darkness outside and for the tears in her eyes. Then the haunted hour was over and the full moon arose and she waited and waited, but the knight never returned. Thereupon she swore to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom. And as her first bridegroom never and nevermore came back, so she waited for another, but there was no one who knew her story who would woo her, because each one thought it would fare with him as it had fared with that other. Thus she died; her oath is however still unfulfilled. Whenever it is full moon, she is looking out to see if any bridegroom comes and she laments sorely, and holds her hands weeping toward the moon.”

In this folk tale the exclusively sexual foundation of the wandering is quite plainly expressed. The ghost makes use of a voice, complaining and threatening at the same time, which the bridegroom believes to be the call for help of his best friend, and the bride on the other hand imagines it the voice of her cousin, who had been found dead two years before, perhaps after she had taken her own life because unhappy in love. Both may be driven by sexual jealousy—I offer this as a hypothesis—which would not permit the other sexual gratification which is denied to himself or herself, the friend perhaps meaning jealousy from a homosexual tendency. The ghost having accomplished its purpose at the hour of midnight and in the light of the full moon, the lady swore “to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom.” That is the kernel of the entire myth, the naÏve and yet apparently conclusive folk interpretation of the riddle of moon walking, at least in its most frequent form.

I have above taken it for granted that Maria's erotism was satisfied through her care for her father. That must of course be understood with some qualification. For she could play the rÔle of mother only as housekeeper, not as wife. The former is satisfying therefore only so long, until stronger sexual impulses awaken through external stimuli or, according to rule, through the natural development of a maiden. When once that has come to pass, one so disposed to it as Maria was, begins to wander in the moonlight. Why then, it may further be asked, does Maria seek for her childhood bed, if the goal and the aim of the wandering is the sexual satisfaction of the maiden? In the case analyzed at the beginning the compelling motive was a sexual self stimulation upon the mother, in later years in the loved object whoever it was, male or female. In most cases, since normal sexual feeling predominates, the aim of the sleep walking is that of the folk tale, to go to bed with the lover. That would explain without difficulty the scene of the union in Maria's case, as soon as she had come to know Eisener.

But what lay specially at the foundation of her earlier wandering, when no man had yet made an impression upon her? Or was there perhaps one, in relation to whom sexuality is most strongly forbidden, her own father? What if her erotic desire toward him was repressed and the indifference which she had attained was transferred over to all men? Much that is apparently harmless is permitted to a child, which would be regarded with horror in the adult. Many parents like to take their children into bed early in the morning and play with them without any consciously sexual thoughts and without suspecting how very often they in this way stimulate sexual desire in their children. Frequently also the mother or father visit the child before going to sleep, lean over the bed, allow themselves often to press the child passionately to themselves and count this asexual love toward the child. The case analyzed at the beginning teaches us how much of the grossly sexual erotic is concealed behind this, even if well hidden. Maria likewise sought presumably in her sleep walking for the bed of her childhood because her earliest erotism was bound with it.

This had already happened under the instigation of puberty, before her heart had spoken. How is it now since she loves Eisener? We must keep in mind her unconscious wish, to climb into the bed of the man she loves, and on the other hand that Maria as housemother knew well that he was not sleeping alone, but with his friend, so only a compromise form of action would be possible. So she goes up again to her childhood room, which lies in the same direction as Eisener's sleeping room. There she first draws the curtain aside that she may gaze at the moon, which increases the sexual excitement with her, as I have earlier discussed. Then she undresses before the mirror as she probably had done as a child, and moves forward toward the beloved one, who after a brief struggle with himself embraces her passionately. She nevertheless submits to his caresses without response but also without resistance. For thus alone can the fiction be maintained that she has loved without consciousness of it and therefore also without culpability. It is not difficult, according to the analysis of the first case, to understand how she finally at the withdrawal of the moonlight gets up again, dresses herself before the mirror and leaves the room as noiselessly as she had entered it.

The later portions of the narrative must confirm my assumptions if they are correct, that Eisener merely embraces the mother in Maria and that she on the other hand knows well enough in the unconscious both as child and as maiden that she wishes for that which is sexually forbidden and knows whom she desires. Let us see what the poet tells us. As Eisener awakes after the bridal night, he is not at all invigorated and uplifted as otherwise a man in like case, but psychically and physically cast down, as if he had to atone for some great wrong. “He strove to consider the strange adventure of this night as the delusion of a fevered dream. Yet that adventure painted itself before him, in spite of all his effort to forget it, in ever more vivid colors,” because indeed a wish of his heart had been fulfilled through it. His inner unrest drove him forth and, as walking about he met his beloved, he marveled “that Maria seemed taller to him today than yesterday, or rather that he believed that he first noticed today that she was tall.” What could this mean except that Maria now seemed big to him as once the mother had seemed to the small boy? Only he had first to embrace his beloved, before he could perceive such a thing and give heed to it. Maria herself, who apparently had enjoyed her pleasure only in her sleep and unconsciously, and therefore knew nothing of it all, had lost her frank manner with him, which she still possessed the day before. She grew red at his look and drew the hand which she gave him “quickly back again in confused fear,” without consciously knowing why. “The flower of womanhood which had slumbered in her too serene, too cold image, appeared in this one night to have come with magic swiftness to bud and immediately to have unfolded in all its fragrance.” Maria herself pictures her condition: “That morning I can never forget. Everything was so still, so solemn; the guests were all yet asleep. I had never been so strong of heart. I felt that morning as if all my life before had been only a dream and life was now just beginning. It seemed to me that I had suddenly become grown up and was now for the first time a child no more.” Maria thus felt herself through the bridal night to have grown up from the child to the mother, only, now, it was for the lover who had taken the father's place.

Both Eisener and Maria conducted themselves further entirely in accordance with their earlier unconscious wishes. The former for example “found a growing pleasure in representing his own action, when it was really the effect of many circumstances acting one upon the other, as the result of a cold, calm calculation on his part.” And was it not at bottom actually something like a calculation, since he in his earliest childhood phantasies imagined something similar for himself from the mother? It is only natural that he now greatly exaggerated in consciousness the sin which he had desired. Never for a moment did it occur to him “to throw any part of the burden of guilt upon that being who so closely participated in it. His rightful feeling remained in regard to it that he had this night given to a woman a right to himself, which he, if she should demand it, could not dispute. It was a source of calmness to him to look upon himself as punished, as it were, in this manner.” Only all too evident! This punishment was in reality a disguised reward, fulfilment of the infantile wish to win the mother.[24] For this reason he had not been able earlier to withstand Julie although Maria attracted him far more. For the former was the indulgent mother of his power of imagination, the latter on the contrary the proud, unapproachable mother of his real childhood. Moreover, though he did not conceal from himself that his heart belonged to the chaste Maria, yet he resolved, if Julie should convince him that she had been the ghostly visitor, to offer her his hand immediately. “The doubt, whether she deserved it, which was near enough at hand, he put from him as an excuse which he wished to make so that he could believe that he might release himself from that which he had to recognize as his duty.” Maria however “he had in these days accustomed himself to think of as a being so high above him that his love must profane her.” Again the well known splitting of the mother into the holy and the yielding one.

How did it appear at this time to her, herself? The first weeks after that moonlight night the woman in her bloomed forth more and more, in spite of the fact that her lover tarried at a distance. Yet when in her body a new life began to develop and Eisener still did not appear, she was seized suddenly with a hysterical convulsion—she was wearing significantly the same rose-colored dress in which he had seen her that morning—which lasted twelve hours so that every one looked upon her as dead. The despairing father threw himself across her feet and lay there—a situation which will occupy us later—and Eisener, who was just now returning, was driven by the bitterest self reproaches across the ocean. After waking from her catalepsy Maria did not regain her former blooming health but grew more and more ill, which the family physician finally discovered as the result of her pregnancy.

“The good girl herself believed at first that what she felt and what they told her was a vivid troubled dream.” This idea will not appear strange to us who know so much about moon walking and that one does everything merely “in sleep” in order to remain blameless. “That she should become a mother seemed to her so strange and wonderful that she appeared to herself as some one else (this might well read, as her own mother dead at so early an age) or as suddenly transplanted into another world with strange people, animals and trees. The sound of her own voice, the tone of the bells seemed to her as other and strange sounds.” We may bring forward in explanation in this place the case analyzed at the beginning, where a moon walker had abandoned herself to all sorts of dreams. In the moon must be living men of another sort with other feelings, customs and manners, and the sexual, strongly forbidden upon earth, must be freely permitted upon this planet. She seemed to herself on account of her sexual phantasies already as a child quite different from other people, as if she belonged not upon this earth but upon the moon. Could not a similar thought process have taken place with Maria?

I said of her father, that he had been her first beloved. And it comes almost as an unconscious recognition of this when he, filled with anger, calls out to her mockingly, “Why do you not say that the whole affair has come to pass out of love to me, to prepare for me an unexpected joy?” Breitung also enjoyed since her earliest childhood her unlimited confidence only on this account because he loved her as his own child. Therefore she looks up with all her anxiety so trustfully and self confidently to this friend of her father. But when Breitung also no longer believed in her and her father turned from her with scorn it was “as if all her blood streamed into her eyes that, pressing out as tears, it might relieve her. Yet here it remained and pressed upon her brain as if threatening its fibers. With a strangely fearful haste she pressed her eyes with her fingers; they remained dry; a cry of pain would unburden her soul—no sound accompanied the trembling, convulsive breathing. The old servant, who entered after a while, found her lying with her breast upon the sofa pillow, her head thrown violently back,” in hysterical opisthotonos. “The old man had loved Maria from her earliest childhood” and stood accordingly in the place of a father. “He clasped his hands together in distress. She recognized him and suffered him patiently to bring her head to a less forced position. She looked at him sharply as if she would convince herself that he was the one she took him to be. His Kalmuck features seemed to her as beautiful as the soul which they hid and seemed to want to disown.

“The friendliness, the affectionate regard, which spoke so unmistakably out of the familiar old graybearded, sunburnt face, did her no end of good.” Since she could not yet entirely believe she asked, “Is it indeed you, Justin? And you will still recognize me? And you do not flee from me?” At first the deplorable commission which the old man had to carry out threw her back again. When she had to understand that her father would not again set foot in the pastor's house until she had departed, her countenance became deathly pale and convulsive movements trembled in quick succession over her delicate body so that the old man wept aloud, for he believed that she had gone mad. His signs of distress, the faithfulness and love which spoke through them, touched her so effectually that at last the hysterical convulsion relaxed and she sank down. “The old man caught her up. He placed her on the sofa. She lay across his lap; her head lay upon his left hand, with the other he held her body fast that it should not slip to the floor. It seemed as if she would weep her whole weary self away. The old servant held her with trembling hand and heavy heart.” Now the scene of childhood is complete, except that the old man plays the rÔle of her father. So had Maria presumably done as a child when she felt too unhappy and so also the pastor's throwing himself down, as we saw above, over his daughter whom he believed dead, is not strange. When Maria had left the parsonage her first thought and silent concern was how her father must now live without her care, even that perhaps he would not be there any more, when everything had later turned out well. Then she thought again of the time when she would be a mother and “her life seemed to her as a tale that is told.” On her journey to her new home there came over her ever more strongly “the feeling of her complete abandonment. All the dear childhood memories, into whose protection she would flee, turned in anger from her. With tears she cried to God for a heart that she might love, some one for whom she might really care. For it seemed as if a curse lay upon her, which estranged all hearts from her. She thought with fear at her heart that the being to whom she would give life might likewise turn from her, as everything had done that she loved.” Then a good fate brings to her the unfortunate Johannes whom his crazy father wished to throw into the water in order to preserve him for eternal happiness. At once Maria assumes the rÔle of mother toward the boy and now “that once more she had to care for some one, she was again the calm and serene being.”

What had so thrown her out of her course? It was not so much the banishment from the father's house, not the contempt of all the world, nor even of her very oldest and truest friend. She would have been able to look beyond both of these, because her consciousness felt itself entirely blameless. But she took so to herself the truth that she was no more the loving, caretaking house mother nor might play that part, that for a brief while she planned to take her life. She prayed to God with tears for one heart only that she might love, that she might actually care for. Since the care of her father is taken from her she feels herself at first truly and utterly forlorn, all the dear memories of childhood turn in anger from her and a curse seems to rest upon her soul.

Why do all the memories of her childhood turn from her, if she actually knows herself guiltless? Is this merely because the father is indissolubly bound with them? If she still consciously feels entirely blameless toward him, and if he openly did her wrong from a false assumption, then should not the childhood memories return to her? I think the solution must be sought elsewhere, in this, that Maria knew nothing in clear consciousness of the happenings of that moonlight night and could honestly swear to that, but everything was known in the unconscious. Here is the sense of guilt engendered, of which consciousness may know nothing, here she knows well enough that the youthful Eisener has embraced her and she has together with him deceived the father whom she first loved. The goal of all moon walking is none other than to be able to enjoy and still be blameless, it is blamelessness because without accompanying consciousness.

The poet's words must confirm this, if this assumption is correct. We will test them. The first night of her banishment Maria, while going to sleep, thought first of her father “who must go to bed without the little services which he was accustomed to receive from her.” Then she thought of Breitung and the apothecary's daughter, who had turned from her full of scorn. “The young Eisener occurred to her in the midst of this, she knew not how, and a sort of curiosity whether Eisener also would have turned from her in so unfriendly a fashion as Breitung. She pictured to herself how he might have looked upon her now with contempt, now with friendliness, as on that morning which she so gladly remembered.” Also an evident identification of the young Eisener with the father and the father's friend, and flight from the loved ones who had cast her off to him who had inclined to her as a friend.

Yet more convincing is a passage which follows. Maria had born a son and “the more she looked with joy upon the small infant contemplating his sound and beautiful body, the more grew the need within her, only instinctively felt at first, to have some one who could rejoice in the child with her, not out of mere sympathy with her, but because he had the same right to it and so that she could rejoice again in his joy, as he might in hers. Without knowing how and why, she thought again of the friendly and true hearted Eisener. Her dreams brought his picture before her eyes in most vivid colors. It seemed as if it were Eisener who should enjoy the child with her. She hastened to him with tears of joy to lay the beautiful boy in his arms, and when she now stood by him, she had scarcely the heart to show him the boy. Then she cast down her eyes and said confusedly, ‘See this beautiful child, Eisener, Sir!’” Maria knew quite well in the unconscious that she had conceived her child from Eisener and the sudden restraint when she laid the boy in his arms is only a compromise with consciousness, which must not know the facts, otherwise she could not be spared her feeling of guilt. Yes, when Julie then came with her love child, which she had conceived that same moonlight night from the hunter, although she really loved Eisener, then “Maria experienced, she knew not why, a gentle aversion toward her. She said quietly, ‘That in which one has done no wrong and cannot change, one must bear patiently.’”Soon however there awoke a desire in her “for something new, still unknown to her, which she nevertheless felt must come now. It was the strange, fearfully sweet condition of the ripeness of love, which had not yet found the object on which she could open her heart. That night a need awakened, formerly repressed into the background by greater pain, but which threatened now to outgrow other desires and feelings in the undisputed possession of him.” Often she sat knitting and dreaming at the boy's cradle. “There was a fair at Marklinde. She went early in her rose-colored dress into the garden and plucked wild hedge roses. She was startled for she heard a noise behind her and she knew that it was Eisener who was coming after her. She turned into another path; she was afraid to meet him, and yet she wished that he would follow her. As she bent low behind some flowers, she threw a hasty look behind her. She grew rosy because he might have noticed the look, and still it would have made her glad if he had noticed it. ‘Yet if he knew everything,’ she whispered to herself; ‘but I could not tell him, nor could I let him perceive it. I would have to say No, although he understood it as Yes!’ Suddenly he stood near her; he had seized her hand and was looking into her eyes. She bowed her head, he bent toward her. It seemed so strange to her—their lips touched—Maria frightened and blushing, sprang involuntarily from her chair, as if what she was dreaming were real.

“A strangely mingled feeling drove her from her chair to the window and from the window back to the chair. She felt herself stirred in her very depths by something which wounded her sensibility as much as it excited her longing. She fled to her child. She strove to think of something else; in vain. That thought continually returned and gradually lost its frightful character. Soon she felt it only as a sweet dread and so the idea received a double stimulation while it woke the curious question, why and for what reason she must really be afraid. And as she looked now upon the child, it seemed to her so marvellous that she, mother and yet maiden, knew nothing of the happiness of which this little life must be the fruit. Julie's words were continually ringing in her ears, ‘The happiness which is granted him, has to be reckoned too dear.’ It gave her unending satisfaction, to think of herself actually in such a situation to the young Eisener that all her unhappiness was the result of a joy which she had granted him, without knowing what joy this must have been.” I consider it superfluous to add a word to complete the interpretation of these phantasies, which speak for themselves. They confirm everything that I have said above, better than any labored explanation. Later Maria came to know that what had sustained her in the hours of her sorrow was nothing else than that mysterious but certain premonition of a happy life with Eisener and her George.

And now back to the purpose of the analysis of all these tales. What does it teach us for the understanding of moon walking? First of all it confirms many of our earlier conclusions. The most important thing, in the first place, is that sexual impulses lie at the foundation, desire for sexual gratification, and that one apparently acts in sleep in order to escape all culpability, while the unconscious still knows all about it. The sleep walking begins, in accordance with the sexual basic motive, at the time of puberty and lasts until it is inhibited by the close of that period or in women with the birth of the first child. It is further established that at the beginning the bed of childhood is sought, the place of earlier sexual pleasures, later however the bed of the loved object, who appears in the place of the originally loved object, the parent. Finally, moreover, when the night wanderer fixes his closed eyes upon the moon before starting out on his wandering, erotic thoughts hide behind this, which in turn go back to earliest childhood. The heavenly body effects a sexual excitement not only through its light, but indeed also through sexual phantasies which are bound with it. Lastly folk myth knows likewise that the woman in white represents nothing else than the maiden in her night shift with all her sexual longings.

One thing more this novel also confirms, which our earlier discoveries have already taught us, the abnormal muscle excitability and muscle erotic. For Maria was seized with a hysterical convulsion when her father's unkindness pressed itself upon her. It is interesting that this abnormal muscle excitability, which manifested itself in various muscular convulsions, was present with Otto Ludwig throughout his earthly career. Already as a boy he often suffered convulsive muscular twitchings, when he had exceptional tasks to perform or hard thinking was required of him, and “nervous twitchings of the head” are recorded of him when twenty-three years old, also presumably a tic had won for him the nickname of “the shaker.” Later moreover our poet suffered chronically from convulsive manifestations of a lesser degree, repeatedly however in a stronger, special form although only in temporary attacks.[25]

In other words, it may be said that Ludwig assigns to Maria and the young Eisener a series of his own personal characteristics. That is to say, not only was the tendency to convulsive attacks peculiar to him, but also to fainting, and a compulsive neurotic and hysterical tendency, the high grade myopia, a fondness for discussing painting, talking with inanimate things,[26] colored audition, as well as other synesthesias, and finally a special reverence for his mother.

“Buschnovelle,” by Otto Ludwig.

The moon plays an important part in the romance just discussed, even apart from Maria's night wandering, and a number of significant events take place under its very light. We find this relationship still stronger in Otto Ludwig's “Buschnovelle,” briefly referred to earlier, which I add here, though it really does not directly treat of our problems. The heroine Pauline passed with many as moon struck and her blue eyes “have a strange expression of their own. They gaze as aliens upon this world, as angels, which, transplanted to our marvelous earth, belong to the heavenly home and cannot find themselves amid this confused and agitated humanity.” Likewise his bride asserts of the count that he knows no other recreation “than to climb about in the night over the rocks and worship the moon.” This perhaps gave occasion to the rumor of a ghost or at least breathed new life into an old tale.

A prince was banished under an enchantment to the rocks of the gods. He had “a face as of a person twenty years old or so, but pale and quite transparent like moonlight, and he could be rescued only through a maiden eighteen years old and as innocent as when she came from the mother's womb.” The count, whom his bride deceived, became very melancholy over it and trusted no woman after this. He learned to know and love Pauline upon the rocks of the gods, where he was accustomed to wander in the moonlight. When she believed she saw in him the enchanted prince and declared her intention of voluntarily rescuing him, he stipulated that she must climb down from off the rocks, down from the cross, without touching them with her hands but holding her arms toward the full moon. “And that must take place tomorrow night when the moon is sailing overhead, otherwise I must remain enchanted. When you shall have climbed down the rocks, I shall be saved and then I will make you my princess.” One may read afterward from the poet how Pauline then carried out her resolve—her determination alone, sprung evidently from a great love, had already cured the count of his sadness—how the count saved her and later wooed her.

Emphasis will be laid here merely upon two facts, first that not only all important events happen in the light of the full moon, but that also no other novel shows so many autobiographical features. The most recent publisher of this tale, Heinrich Borcherdt, gives this explanation: “One can recognize without much trouble in the portrait of the count with his well-trimmed beard the poet himself, who at that time tended to great seriousness and to melancholy. For this very reason the cheerfulness, gaiety and unrestrained naturalness of his bride Emilie worked most refreshingly upon him. Pauline in the tale exercised a similar influence upon the count. What we know of Emilie Ludwig from without agrees likewise with the picture of Pauline. Pauline's father suggests Emilie's father.… The greatest weight will be laid upon the fact that we possess in this work a poetic glorification of Otto Ludwig's love happiness in Triebischtal. The rural life is reproduced in every detail.” Nothing unfortunately is reported in the different sketches of his life whether and how far the poet and his bride allowed themselves to be influenced by the light of the full moon. The striking fact remains at any rate that twice in the course of two years he spun out this theme and each time moreover with a strongly autobiographical note. That cannot be sufficiently explained merely through the influence of Tieck, whom he, to be sure, read diligently in his youth.

“Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum,” by Theodor Mundt (“Life's Magic, Reality and Dream”).

In the seventh volume of the “Euphorion” Richard M. Meyer has exhumed a probable source of Ludwig's “Maria.” It is a fictitious tale of the “young German” Theodor Mundt, which appeared in his collection “Charaktere und Situationen” in 1837, five years before the “Maria,” and shows in fact some external similarities with this. Still Otto Ludwig expressly acknowledges a tale told by a friend as the source, but gives no syllable of mention to Mundt. I must say that it seems at least very questionable that the latter's story was the model, although the Berlin literary historian comes to the conclusion, “A direct utilization would be here difficult to dispute.” I will reproduce the contents of this story, as far as it touches our problems, as closely as possible in the words of Mundt, although this story, which is contained in the collection mentioned under the separate title of “Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum,” hardly possesses an artistic value.

The theological student Emil Hahn had, as one of his friends states, “lost life itself over his books and before his merry companions, who would have initiated him into the true enjoyment of existence, crowed many a moral cock-a-doodle-doo of virtue and self restraint.” On the ride home to his father and foster sister Rosalinde he was urged by two student acquaintances to a little drinking bout, at which he partook of more wine than was good for him. The two comrades sang the praises of Rosalinde, whom Hahn had left as a fourteen year old girl and who in the two years of separation had blossomed out in full beauty. As Hahn returned to the father's house in a half intoxicated state and met Rosalinde in an adjacent room, he found at once, in contrast to his shyness of former times, the courage to approach her. “Ardently and daringly he embraced her and the passionate kiss which he impressed upon her maidenly lips was followed, as one lightning flash succeeds another, by a second more lingering one, which was reluctant to leave off.” After he had for some time, again quite contrary to his custom, held his own place at the large party which his father was giving that very evening, “he felt himself gradually seized with weariness and the lively and excited mood, to which the wine he had enjoyed had awakened him, began little by little to disappear with the intoxication. He made his adieus in a dejected tone and betook himself with heavy, hanging head to his room, there to recover himself through sleep, which he could no longer withstand because of his painful state.

“It was late in the night when Emil sprang from his bed. A vivid dream seemed to have confused and frightened him. He stood half clothed in the middle of his room and stared straight ahead as if trying to recollect himself. Above in the night sky glowed the full round moon with a sharp ray seldom seen and its white silver light pierced directly over the head of the youth walking in his sleep. The room gleamed brightly in the moonbeams trembling with mystery, which had spun themselves out in long, glimmering threads over floor and ceiling. Emil had fastened his eyes upon the great disk of the moon and staggered with uncertain steps to the window to open it.” While he stood thus there came a small snow white cat—the cat is well known as a favorite animal of the romantic writers—and spoke to him: “I am come to congratulate you on your bridal night. Yes, yes, I know well that you are married. This is a beautiful night to be married. The moon shoots down right warmly, and its strong shining stings the blood and we cats also feel the impulses stirring in the whispering May night. Happy one, you who are married! Married to Rosalinde!”

“Emil, distracted, clasped his forehead. Everything which he saw about him appeared to him changed and even the inanimate things in his vicinity seemed in this moment to have been drawn into a magic alliance. Everything, the very table, chair, press looked at him, rocking themselves saucily in the bright moonlight, personally and familiarly, and had to his eyes, arms and feet to move about, mouths to speak with, senses for communication. At the same time a fair picture rose before the youth deep out of the bottom of his heart, at which he smiled longingly. It was the recollection of Rosalinde and her matured beauty. She passed like a burning, ominous dream through his soul and he felt himself drunken, trembling, exultingly united with the proud but now subdued maiden in a love thrilled bridal night. While he was thus lost in thought his look was held chained by a painting, which hung on the wall opposite him. Strange, it was Rosa's portrait and he knew not whether this picture had just now arisen warm with life merely out of the force of the idea which was kindling him, or whether it had actually been formed over there in its golden frame by a painter's hand.” Then the cat mewed again: “That is your young wife Rosalinde. The moonbeam chases her; see how its brightness kisses her temples unceasingly. The young woman is queen on her bridal night. We will crown her, all we who are here in this room and owe our life to the brightness of the moonlight night, we will crown her. I present her for her bridal crown burning, tender desires.” Then the May blossoms in the room bestirred themselves and conferred upon her the bloom of fond innocence for her bridal crown. Also the bird in the cage made himself understood: “I give her for her bridal crown the score of my latest melody. Harmony and melody should be the dower of all young brides.” Finally a cockchafer also which flew in offered her for her bridal crown “a pair of lovely crickets.”

“The dreaming Emil, surrounded by these fairy treasures of the May night, stood in sweet intoxication opposite the glowing picture, bathed in moonlight, of the maiden to whom all this homage belonged. The longer and the more vividly he pictured to himself and leaned toward all the maidenly charms, which had allowed the first passionate wish in the young man's phantasy to blaze up, the more an impatience, almost consuming, pounding, benumbing his heart, seized him, which he did not know how to explain and had never felt before in his life. Like a seductively sweet poison the delusion imparted itself secretly to him that Rosalinde was his bride, his wife, and that this wondrously beautiful spring night, bright with moonlight, was his wedding night. His heart swelled with mighty, growing desire, youthful passion breathed high in him. Trembling, fearful, wavering, longing, he still felt himself strangely happy.

“Then it seemed to him that Rosalinde's picture began to move, as if the gleaming shoulders lifted themselves gradually and gently at first from it. Then the delicate outline of the bosom rose as the lovely form came forth, the face streaming with love bowed itself in modest shame before him. The form grew larger, rose to full beauty, stretched itself to life size. Smiling, beckoning, gazing at him full of mystery, promising favor and happiness, she took some steps toward him, then fled back again ashamed and as if frightened, floated away with sylphlike movements to the door and remained hidden behind it, yet peeping and looking out at the youth.

“He did not know if he should, if he might follow her. He was drawn powerfully after her and yet he stood still and hesitated. The bright moonlight seemed, like a fairy toward one enchanted, to make merry at the loud anxious beating of his heart. He restrained himself no longer; with a passionate movement he hastened with open arms to the beloved apparition, desiring to embrace her, throw himself upon her bosom, breathe out upon her his burning desire. She fled, he followed her. She fled before him, but softly and alluringly and he, intoxicated, rushed after her from room to room unable to overtake the form flitting on with ghostly swiftness. Like a star drawing him onward she floated there before him, his footsteps were as if bewitched by her running, and thus she led him after her, on and on, through a succession of rooms, so that he marveled and thought himself wandering about in a great, unfamiliar enchanted palace.

“At last he saw her no more, the lovely picture had suddenly disappeared from him. He must however still hasten and hasten, there was no rest for him. He no longer knew himself what he was seeking and what he hoped to find. But now he ran upon a door; it opened and he entered a small, cosy room in which stood a white bed. Seized with a strange apprehension the youth drew back the curtains with bold hand, and looked, astonished, smiling, burning with bliss. There lay a beautiful maiden asleep and dreaming—ah! it was Rosalinde herself. In the sweet forgetfulness of sleep, unveiling herself like the outblown petals of a rosebud, she revealed her most secret charms in lovely fulness to the eye of night. Emil stood before her in the dear delusion of aroused passion and bent over her. ‘Is not tonight my bridal night?’, thought he. He reflected and the hot tumult of exulting senses tore him irresistibly. Then he flung himself passionately into her arms, pressed his mouth to her mouth in yearning kisses and clung closer and closer to the warm, living delight of her charming form. He dared the boldest work of love. The sleeper did not oppose the daring beginning; in the power of a dream, like him, according to the myth, whom the chaste Luna had seized, she seemed at first to yield softly to the seductive moment. Only a glowing color suffused the tender cheek, a gentle halting exclamation breathed through the half open lips. The bright light of the full moon shone on high with its trembling beams directly over the couch of the maiden.

“Now, now however she awakes from the strange troubled dream. She opens her eyes, she shakes her beautiful head as if she would free herself from the fetters of a dark enchantment. With a loud outcry she beholds herself actually in the young man's arms and sees alas! that she has not dreamed it. Wildly with all the strength of horror she pushes him from her, springs up and stands wringing her hands distracted before him, her fluttering hair only half disclosing her frightened countenance. Then she calls him by name in a tone indescribably piercing, painfully questioning, ‘Emil!’ He in turn, hearing himself called by name, falls at the same moment with a faint sigh swooning to the floor. After a pause he raises himself up, rubs his eyes and looks wonderingly about him. He cannot comprehend how he has come here. The influence of the moon has permitted the poor night wanderer to experience this adventure. When he was completely awake and had come to himself, he stood up and began to think over his situation. Then his eye fell astonished upon Rosalinde, who continued to stare at him speechless and immovable. Shame and anger adorned with a deep glowing color the injured maiden, whose virgin whiteness had been sullied by the strange events of this night. A dark, frightening recollection of what had taken place flashed now like a remote, faded dream into Emil's consciousness. The alluring spirits of the night, which had buzzed around him, now mockingly stripped from him the deceitful mask.

“‘Go, go, go!’ called Rosalinde finally, who could no longer bear his look. ‘Go!’ she called and stretched out her hand with a passionate movement toward him, as if she would with it jerk a reeking dagger from her breast. ‘Go, go!’ she repeated, sobbing and beseeching. Then she hid her aching head with a loud outbreak of tears. Emil slipped away heartbroken and in despair. He was in such a state, when he reached his own room, that he would have put a ball through his head, had there been at that moment a pistol at hand.” How Rosalinde then became pregnant and in spite of her resistance toward Emil, still married him to reËstablish her honor, how though after the wedding feast two acquaintances of the young husband, whom he had not invited, played him so mischievous a trick that he lost his reason in consequence, that deserves no further rendering.

We find here also as the nucleus of moon walking, when we strip from the foregoing all its mystical setting, the longing to approach the love object and there to be able to indulge oneself without punishment because it is done unconsciously. The literary historian Richard M. Meyer regards it quite correctly: “Theodor Mundt believed that he had emphasized something new in his way of presenting it. ‘The influence of the moon had caused the night wanderer to undergo this adventure.’” To be sure Mundt attributes all sorts of mystical-romantic rubbish to the action of the heavenly body.

“Der Prinz von Homburg,” by Heinrich von Kleist.

Heinrich von Kleist also like Ludwig carried night wandering and moon walking into material at hand. We know that Kleist not long before the origin of the “Prinz von Homburg” under Schubert's influence occupied himself very much with the “night side of the natural sciences” and Wukadinovic has made it also apparent that the poet went still deeper, back to one of Schubert's sources, to Reil's “Rhapsodien Über die Anwendung der psychischen Kurmethode auf GeisteszerrÜttungen.”[27] There he found a number of features which he then interwove into his drama, although by no means all that he permitted his moonstruck hero to do. The matter of the drama is presumably so well known that I content myself here with giving the mystical setting and the beginning and end of the action.

Wearied with a long ride, the Prince von Homburg throws himself down to sleep that he may obtain a little rest before the great battle in which he is about to engage. In the morning when they seek the leader they find him sitting on a bench in the castle park of Fehrbellin, whither the moonlight had enticed the sleep walker. He sits absorbed with bared head and open breast, “Both for himself and his posterity, he dreams the splendid crown of fame to win.” Still further, the laurel for this crown he himself must have obtained during the night from the electoral greenhouse. The electress thinks, “As true as I'm alive, this man is ill!” an opinion in which the princess Natalie concurs. “He needs the doctor.” But Hohenzollern, his best friend, answers coolly, “He is perfectly well. It is nothing but a mere trick of his mind.”

Meanwhile the prince has finished winding the wreath and regards it idly. Then the elector is moved to see how far the former would carry the matter and he takes the laurel wreath out of his hand. “The prince grows red and looks at him. The elector throws his necklace about the wreath and gives it to the princess; the prince stands up roused. The elector withdraws with the princess, who holds up the wreath; the prince follows her with outstretched arms.” And now he betrays his inmost wish, “Natalie! my girl, my bride!” In vain the astonished elector, “Go, away with you!” for the prince turns also to him, “Friedrich, my prince, my father!” And then to the electress, “O my mother!” She thinks wonderingly, “Whom is it he thus names?” Yet the prince reaches after the laurel wreath, saying, “Dearest Natalie! Why run away from me?” and really seizes her gloves rather than the wreath. The elector however disappearing with his retinue behind the gates calls to him:

“The prince remains standing a moment with an expression of wonder before the door, then pondering descends from the terrace, laying his hand, in which he holds the glove, before his forehead, turns as soon as he is below and looks again toward the door.” Out of this state the Hohenzollern returning awakens him. At the word “Arthur” the moonstruck prince collapses. “No better could a bullet have been aimed.” Afterward of course he makes up some story in regard to his sleep walking, that he had slipped into the garden on account of the great heat. Only the princess's glove recalls to him what has happened in his sleep:

For the name of the princess there is amnesia, as well as for the reason for his moon walking. Then he continues:

Now again the complete forgetting of the loved one's name. He can only say:

It is evident that there is complete memory of the latter part of his night wandering up to the name of the beloved maiden, although he thinks, “One dumb from birth to name her would be able!” Only once, when he was dreaming by himself, he was on the way toward recollecting the repressed name. He turns even to the Hohenzollern:

But he was cut off briefly by his friend, “Eh, what! this long while they've been gone.” The same friend had however to explain in detail later, when he appeared before the elector in behalf of the prince condemned to death:

We see here plainly that the kernel of the supposed dream belonging to the night wandering is wish fulfilment, desire for glory and the hand of the beloved. It agrees very well with this conception that the prince himself takes the laurel from the gardener's forcing house to wind a wreath of honor for himself. He looks at it with admiring eyes and puts it upon himself, playing the rÔle of being beloved, only the elector and Natalie come in to interfere. The princess and the laurel, also love and fame really hypnotize him and draw him magnetically. The prince follows them both with outstretched arms until the elector and Natalie disappear behind the gates. It seems to me very significant that not long before the creation of this drama a crowning with laurel at the hands of a loved one had actually taken place in the life of the poet and that, as it is now generally admitted, Kleist himself stood as the model of the prince. “Two of the smallest, daintiest hands in Dresden,” as Kleist relates, crowned him with laurel at a soirÉe in the house of the Austrian ambassador after the preliminary reading of the “Zerbrochenen Kruges.” (“The Broken Pitcher.”) These daintiest hands belonged to his beloved Julie Kunze, to whom Dame Rumor said he was engaged. Wukadinovic defines quite correctly the connection of the drama with its autobiographical meaning: “As the poet sees the ideal of love arising next to that of poetic fame, so he grants to the ambitious prince, who exhibits so many of his own traits, a loving woman standing at his side, who rewards him at the close with the wreath.”

The matter goes yet much deeper. The prince says of the elector: “Plucks from his neck the chain that's pendant there.… My soul meanwhile enkindled high.” The laurel attains a further value for the prince, because the elector binds his own necklace about it. The latter is continually taken by Homburg as the father, to which a number of verses testify. Since the prince unmistakably stands for the poet, it cannot be denied that Kleist had desired the reward not only from the beloved one, but this still more with the express concurrence of the father. In the beginning to be sure he is repulsed by him, “Naught here for thee, away!” and later on account of his disobedience is even condemned to death.[28] He was not only pardoned, however, after he had acknowledged his wrong and recognized the father's judgment as correct, but when he believed his last hour had struck, he was bedecked with the wreath which he desired and on which moreover his elector's chain hangs. Still further, the latter, the father himself, extends the laurel to Natalie and leads the beloved to him. It is beyond question that love is the chief motive of the moon walking of the prince von Homburg, love to a woman as well as a homosexual tendency otherwise authenticated in the case of Kleist. Only it appears here closely amalgamated with desire for fame, something completely unerotic, and with the sexual, as we have found it so far regularly in night wandering and moon walking, quite excluded.

We will attempt to get more light on the last two points. The striving after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, “I will rend the crown from his brow!” Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. He writes to his sister, however, “Heaven denies me fame, the greatest of earthly possessions; I fling back to it all else like a self willed child!”

What lay in truth behind that unattainable goal that Kleist tried again and again to carry by force? He himself confesses that it was not the highest poetic art or at least not exclusively so. Otherwise Kleist would have been able to content himself with his so commanding talent and with that which he was able to accomplish with it, like so many other great poets. Let us not forget that he sought to outdo especially the three greatest. Therefore I think, in accordance with all my psychoanalytic experience, that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe are together only father incarnations, that Kleist thus wanted to remove the father from the field. One has a right to definite surmisings on the basis of various works of Kleist, although nothing is known to us of the poet's relations to his parents. The incest motive is one of the chief determining factors of artistic creation, as Rank has outlined in his beautiful book.[29] It is in the first place the desired and striven for incest with the mother herself, in the way of which the father naturally stands. The poet realizes in the freer land of poetry what is impossible in life, by displacing it over a discovered or given material.

I discussed in a larger work,[30] previous to Rank's book, how Heinrich von Kleist made the incest phantasies of his childhood the foundation of many poems. So for instance the Marquise von O., assaulted in a fainting fit, is protected from the foe pressing upon her by some one who loves her and will subsequently surely marry her. I need hardly explain that the evil one who will positively force himself upon her is the father, from whom the son defends the mother, that he may subsequently woo her. It is again only the poet himself who sets himself as a youthful ideal god in place of the aging father, as Jupiter descended from his throne renewed in beauty and youth according to his divine power, to visit Alcmene in the form of her spouse Amphitryon. In the “Zerbrochenen Krug” (Broken Pitcher) the judge breaks violently into the room of the beloved one—a typical symbol for one's own father who is also in fact the child's first judge—and is driven out by the rightful lover.

The objection need not be made that the poet has simply held to his pattern. The choice of material betrays the purpose, which frequently remains unconscious. What, we may say, impelled the poet although he wished to translate it wholly, to take up MoliÈre's Amphitryon, one of his weakest productions too, and then change it in so striking a fashion? Quite unlike the French version, Jupiter becomes for Kleist the advocate with the wife-mother:

In truth Kleist, like every other poet, chose the most of his material in accordance with unconscious wishes, where beyond all else the mother complex presses for poetic expression.

Let us apply once more that which has been so far discovered to the “Prinz von Homburg.” This is rendered yet more easy from the fact that the electress is repeatedly designated by the hero as “Mother.” His real mother had indeed at her death delivered him over to the friend of her youth with the words: “Be a mother to him when I am no longer here.” And the electress had answered in similar strain, “He shall be mine as if my own in birth!” But since on the other hand Natalie also addresses her repeatedly as Mother as she does the elector as Father, so Natalie is Kleist's beloved sister in disguise. The poet would desire the laurel wreath thus from his own sister. Why then the father's acquiescence? If we now appeal to our psychoanalytic experience, this teaches us that regularly the sister incest represents a later form of the older and more serious mother incest. The boy, who first desires the mother, satisfies himself later with the less forbidden and more easily accessible sister. All poets follow very significantly this psychoanalytically established relationship, as Rank[31] has recently convincingly shown. The poets often represent this, that the phantasies and wishes are displaced from the mother to the sister or they are split up between mother and sister, which then makes their origin especially clear.

The latter is also the case with Kleist in the “Prinz von Homburg.” He takes for the mother he desires, at one time the electress, at another time Natalie, “his girl, his bride.”[32] It agrees strikingly also that the prince in the fear of death expects to be saved only by the electress, that is the mother, from the punishment with which the elector father threatens him. So a child who knows no way out for himself, no help any more, flees to his mother. Such an unusual, shocking fear of death on the part of a field officer needs explanation. It is nothing else than the child's fear in face of the stern parent. It is further overdetermined in an infantile way. In the drama the prince for a long time does not believe in the grim seriousness of his position. The elector father will only put him to the test. The sudden transition to frantic fear follows first when the friend informs him that Natalie has sent back the addresses carried by the ambassador, because she is betrothed to the latter. This would have so roused the elector against him. From this time on the prince—and the poet—holds everything as possible and is ready to sacrifice even the hand of the beloved for his life.

A second determination likewise is not wanting, which is also infantile. Freud has shown in the “Interpretation of Dreams” that the child does not at all connect the ideas of older people with the words “death” and “to die.” He knows neither the terror nor the shuddering fear of the eternal nothingness. To be dead means to him merely to be away, gone away, no longer to be disturbed in his wishes. For his slight experience has already taught him one thing, dead people, as perhaps the grandparents, do not come back. From this it is only a step that the child sometimes wishes death to his father, when the latter disturbs him. Psychoanalysis tells us that this is not perhaps a shocking exception but a matter of everyday occurrence. Such thoughts are touched upon in the “Prinz von Homburg.” The false report has come that the elector father has been shot and Natalie laments, “Who will protect us from this world of foes?” Then is the prince ready on the spot to offer his hand to the orphaned girl, also apparently to her mother. A child wish comes to fulfilment, the setting aside of the father who interferes with his plans for the mother. When the man believed to be dead nevertheless returns, he pronounces, as we can understand, the sentence of death upon his treacherous son. Only when the latter had acknowledged the justice of the sentence—I might almost have said, after he had asked forgiveness, is he not only pardoned but more than that recompensed, while now the father voluntarily grants him his wish.

It seems to me significant that Kleist freely introduced into his drama the complete condemnation to death as well as night wandering and moon walking. In the first point he had turned tradition quite to its opposite. In the original the great Friedrich relates that on the triumphant battle field the elector has already forgiven the prince that he had so lightly risked the welfare of the whole state: “If I had judged you according to the stern martial law, you would have forfeited your life. But God forbid that I should sully the brightness of this day by shedding the blood of a prince, who was once the foremost instrument of my victory.” Personal reasons, and, as we know from psychoanalysis, these are always infantile reasons, must have been involved when Kleist incorporated this directly into his poetry and yet in so striking a fashion. Some of these reasons I have been able to set forth above.

It is now clear that the apparently asexual desire for fame does not lack its erotic foundation. The desire for fame is so greatly exaggerated in Heinrich von Kleist that he will do no less than tear the laurel from Goethe's forehead, because in his infantile attitude he hopes through an unheard of poetic activity to supplant the father with the mother. After the shipwreck of his masterpiece, the Guiskard material, he longed for death because life had no more value for him, but he finds later in the “Prinz von Homburg” a happier solution. For not only does the mother herself now crown him but does it with the father's affectionate blessing. And the old theme of night wandering and moon walking, that is climbing into bed with the loved one, finds its place here although in an opposite form and under a certain sexual repression. The child does not come to the mother but she to him and places the longed for crown upon his head even with the concurrence of the father. Also the fact that the prince transgresses the elector's commands as the result of his moon walking, to which the prince is subject, must somehow, at least by analogy, have been created from the poet's own breast. Nothing is said about this in regard to Kleist, of whose inner life we know so little. Yet his very great interest in noctambulism and similar “night sides of the human soul,” as well as his exceptional understanding of the same, show that he at least must have possessed a disposition toward it. It should be emphasized once more in conclusion that the moon walking in the “Prinz von Homburg” does not lack the infantile sexual root, nor is the corresponding erotic purpose wanting, which we have always found, heretofore, to come to the loved one without being held responsible.

“Das SÜndkind,” by Ludwig Anzengruber.

“Das SÜndkind” (“The Sin Child”) by Anzengruber (in the first volume of his “DorfgÄnge”) tells of an apparently non-sexually colored wandering by moonlight. There a 45-year-old pitch worker, the mother of twelve children, who had all died except the narrator, and for three years a widow, had become pregnant with a “sin child” whose father no one would acknowledge himself. She had always been a discreet woman, and was almost equal to her son in her work, although he at thirty years old was at the height of his manly strength. She had always been as exemplary in love as in her work, a combination, as we know, not rare to find. Having matured early she was with her first child at the age of fifteen and when she was a widow “the people could not wonder enough how long it would be before she showed her age.” Not rarely “love” suddenly overcame her and even toward her grown son she could occasionally make quite “God forbidden” eyes. One might almost draw the conclusion from the following circumstance that he also was more deeply dependent on the mother than he might acknowledge to himself. Left alone with her during her confinement, he was not able to look at her but drummed on the window pane and became more and more confused although “God knows, there was no call for it.” Then he turned around with his face burning red and said, “You ought to be ashamed, Mother, you ought to be ashamed!” Soon however not only remorse seized him but he began to curse at the folk, who see in the infant not his brother but only the “child of sin.” “Do you think for a moment that I would bear a grudge against the little innocent worm? Curse you, anyone who would separate the children of one mother from each other!” After he had lost the love of his youth in earlier years, he had no more interest in women but dwelt with his mother alone on the land which belonged to the family. Later Martin toiled early and late for the illegitimate child Poldl, as if he were its true father, for whom moreover he never might make inquiry.

When Poldl was perhaps sixteen years old, his mother's health began to fail and with her anxiety at approaching death she began to be concerned for her soul, which she, according to human custom, expressed as care for her illegitimate child. He should dedicate himself to the Lord, should become a clergyman, by which he would remain spotless. Martin, with keen insight, thought thus, “That is indeed the easiest way to get rid of one's own sin, to let some one else atone for it” and feared it might go hard with Poldl, hot blooded by inheritance, but he had no effect upon the mother, who was supported by the boy's guardian. Poldl also did not permit himself simply to be talked of by her, but applied himself ever more deeply to his future sacred calling, especially since all the people of the place already paid court to him as if he were even now an ordained clergyman. “Soon he had no other thought than of his future holy office and he might stay or go where he would, for nothing was for him too good or too bad to remind him of it.” “He strolled about one entire summer,” Martin tells us, “and did not condescend to the least bit of work but when I was out with the farm hands making hay in the meadows or reaping in the field, it very often happened that he rushed unexpectedly out of the bushes and began preaching to them. This seemed quite right to the lazy folk, they would let their work lie and would stand gathered about him and listen devoutly to him and I could not take ill their so excessive piety. The mother thought as they did and found that his absurd preaching there went straight to her heart.”

We will stop here a moment. What drove Poldl so to the priestly calling, what made him so intent upon it? We might mention in passing the vanity and the high sense of importance, which is created by the desire in the sixteen year old boy after the most reverend calling. Yet, though I would in no way undervalue his ambition or the satisfaction of a so pleasantly tickled vanity, yet decisive and determining these can scarcely be. Strong motives must govern in order to explain more completely such an impulsion. When Poldl strode over the fields and began to preach, “At that time the Lord Jesus spoke to the disciples…,” then he was indeed not far from conceiving himself as the Holy One and his mother as the Virgin Mary. Jesus had offered himself for the sins of man, as he now for the sin of his mother. According to this it is nothing else than his love to the mother which drives him to the sacred office, in which it is not to be forgotten that such a love, which leads to a thought obsession, is in the light of experience never without the erotic.

This mingling of sensuality and love to the mother, and to an older woman who could be his mother, shows itself still more clearly two years later, when he has a holiday from the seminary for a few days. He finds at home a buxom picture of a woman, a relative on a visit, almost twice as old as he, the very essence of cheeriness and health. “The boy clung closest to her. In spite of his eighteen years he still seemed childish enough and this he turned to account, and ‘played the calf with her,’” to use the excellent word of the writer.

Six years later Poldl was appointed to assist an invalid vicar, in whose home a regular vicar's cook kept house with her sixteen year old girl, whom she had from the old vicar. In the same year Poldl's mother was laid to rest and her son appeared at her funeral, where the robust peasant girls and maidens pressed themselves upon him. But he “withdrew shyly from every one of them and gave his hand to no one, as he obligingly might have done. He has always before this appeared like milk and blood,” thought Martin, the anxious one, “now he has an unhealthy look, no color, sunken cheeks, and his eyes are deep within, he stares at the ground and cannot bear to have a stranger look at him. It does not please me.”

All this is clear and transparent to the physician. In the young man now twenty-four years old the inherited blood began to make itself felt, and at the same time the cook and her daughter let no stimulus be wanting. He suffered under his self restraint, grew pale and hollow and because only his actions remained chaste but not his thought, he could no more look freely upon a woman. When he now preached in the pulpit, he spoke of the devil as the tempter and of all his evil suggestions. He could declare what evil thoughts come to a man and in closing he threatened his flock most earnestly that the devil would carry them all away together. We know well that no sins are more condemned than those which one holds himself capable of committing or which one would himself most gladly commit if only one dared.

The young priest owed it to a great love which he felt for the miller's daughter that he kept himself pure at least in body. So much the more was the vicar's cook intent upon bringing about his downfall through her girl. Then they could again rule at the vicarage, since the old vicar's days were numbered, when Poldl came into the fat living left vacant. It was at the burial of the old priest that Poldl delivered at the grave the funeral oration for the dead, and endeavored to lay the good example which the old man had given upon the hearts of his flock. As he lifted his eyes once and caught those of the miller's Marie-Liese, who was listening so devoutly, not taking her eyes from him, he suddenly remained stuck in the midst of his speech and could find his place in the text again only with difficulty. Was he not able to maintain before her pure glance the fiction of a noble priest, did it come to his consciousness that he was wandering in the same paths on which the other had been most severely wounded? Something of this the miller's daughter seems to have had in mind, for as she later begged his pardon for having confused him by staring at him, at the same time she advised him not to have anything to do with those at the vicarage. The vicar's daughter, who had stolen up unobserved, shook her fist at them both, while her mother drew Poldl later into a corner to give vent to her feelings, “You cannot have the miller's daughter and do not for a moment believe that she would be willing to have you.”

On his death bed in the lesser parish, which he held later, he complained to Martin, “I should never have been a priest”—with his inherited passionate blood, in spite of his mother's urging and his love to her. “Martin, you have no idea how hard it is to run caught in a sack; it costs a deal of trouble to keep oneself upright. If one does not twist about one falls into it. The cowl was such a sack for me.… Brother, I have unwittingly fallen into disgrace as a wild beast into a trap, and I am more ashamed of it perhaps than the worst sinner of that which he has done deliberately and maliciously. I would not have stayed in the trap, could everything at first only have remained secret, so that no one would have been afraid to extend a clean hand to me, by which I might have found myself and might again belong to the world and everything. But that the others knew right well and they wanted me for themselves and therefore they have behaved without fear or shame so that soon everything was free and open to all Rodenstein from the forest house at one end to the mill at the other. From that time on I have seen no friendly eye, and the blue, yes, the blue eyes (of the miller's daughter) were always turned defiantly away from me. And because she was unkind to me she became all at once kind to some one whom she formerly could not bear. The folk shook their heads and prophesied little good for her. So the time came when I must come here to this parish. There lay upon me what can soon crush one to the ground, for peace and honor were squandered and those who had won them from me hung like chains upon me and the bit of sunshine that I had had in life I had to leave behind in Rodenstein. When however there was added to this concern for her to whom I owed the bit of happiness, I broke under it and then they took me and brought me here and I let myself be brought.”

So had he truly become a child of sin with the feeling of lost purity and a great consciousness of guilt upon his soul. And that he had not merely squandered his own honor and peace but had also dragged the beloved to harm, so that she must have doubts of her purity, this does the rest for him and makes him the willing play ball of the parish folk. From the first day when he took over his new charge, he began to wander in the full moonlight up to the ghostly hour of midnight. At the stroke of twelve he went to the pulpit, over which a bright moonbeam lay, which also lighted up his face as bright as day. With closed eyes he knelt in the pulpit, “his folded hands before him on the upholstered border, the head bowed upon it as if in quiet prayer to collect himself as usual before the sermon. All at once he raised himself, bent forward a little as if the pews were full of people and he wished first to look them over, then he threw his arms to either side and stood there like one who would say, ‘Strike me dead, if I have offended you, but I cannot do otherwise!’ He did not say this but in a voice as of one speaking in a dream he uttered the words, ‘I know of nothing!’ And then once more—his hands extended toward heaven and spread open, as if he would show everything to all within or about the church—‘I know of nothing!’ Afterward he turned and went.”In this classic picture of the brother are some features of a new sort. Above all, sexuality appears only incidentally to play a part, in so far as it awakens the latent tendency to moon walking. Poldl begins to wander at midnight after the miller's daughter is lost to him and he is tortured by anxiety for her future. Otherwise he does what so frequently is done by the moon walker, he carries out the apparently harmless activity of the day as he prays in the church before an imaginary audience. At least he truly imitates the formalities with which prayer begins, though the conclusion does not accord with the beginning. It sounds like a justification before the folk of Rodenstein, who have taken offence at his action, that he stands there in Luther's place as one who cannot do otherwise though one strike him dead. At the same time the repeated outcry at the end, “I know of nothing, I know of nothing!” smacks not only of a denial that he did not know perhaps why Marie had fallen into distress, but suggests the directly infantile. Thus a child insists, when it is reproached, that it has done nothing.

Let us take up again the threads of our narrative. Poldl faded day by day under the pressure of his heavy burden of soul. At last there remained nothing else for him but to let them write to his brother that he lay sick and wished to see him. As Martin entered the sickroom Poldl stretched his lean arms toward him, breathed a heartfelt cry and began to weep aloud like a child. “You are like a father to me, Martin, you are like a father to me!” And from time to time he added, “Forgive me!” Then he stroked Martin's rough hands, “the hands which had toiled for his daily bread when he was a boy.” And now he poured forth his confession. He should not have become a priest, then the people of the parish would have remained strangers to him and he perhaps would have succeeded to the Rodenstein mill. His entire concern centered itself about this, that he had not only lost Marie-Liese but was also to blame for the overthrow of her happiness. He related to his brother how the parish folk had apprehended him, so that he was covered with shame, how they all hung about the great bell of Rodenstein until finally the miller's daughter turned from him and to another. After the confession was made Poldl fell asleep contentedly, yet only to wander that very midnight. The invalid was very ill, when Martin talked with him again the next day. And suddenly he began to speak of the days of his childhood and it was remarkable to the brother “how he had remembered the most trivial thing in regard to it and it seemed to me as if he himself often wondered at it in the midst of his speech. Bit by bit thus he took up his life and we talked together of the time when he ran about the sitting-room and the court in his little child's frock, until the time when he went to school, to the seminary, to Rodenstein.… The sun had set when with our prattle we had come to the place where we were, at Weissenhofen. ‘That's the end,’ I said, ‘and there remains nothing else to tell.’—‘Yes, yes,’ said my brother reflectively, ‘that's the end, and there remains nothing more to tell.’” Soon he noticed how truly Martin had spoken in every respect, for the end had come for him now physically. With a blessing on his lips for the newly won brother of his heart, he laid himself down to sleep. “It had become still as a mouse in the room. After perhaps a quarter of an hour I heard him say, ‘Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast.’ With this he threw himself suddenly over to the right, drew a deep breath, and it was over.”

Let us consider once more the circumstances of the moon walking which accompanied this. He begins with this after his removal from Rodenstein and from his heart's beloved. There had preceded the grief over his wasted honor and his forfeited peace, the pain at the loss of the miller's daughter and, which is rather conclusive, the torturing regard for her future, which completely paralyzed his will power. The latter point is somewhat remarkable. For at bottom it was never said that her marriage was unhappy. The people had shaken their heads before it, only, and prophesied nothing good. When Martin fourteen years after the death of his brother meets Marie-Liese at his grave, she has become a handsome woman and has been a widow for eight years but is well poised mentally and lives for her boy. In Poldl's concern the wish must indeed have been father of the thought. If he could not have his treasure, then she should not be happy at the side of another man. Yet apparently this does not refer alone to the miller's daughter. Psychoanalytic experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the causes, that is the new added to the old.

We can say further, if we apply this experience to the poet's narrative, Poldl had not merely lost the miller's daughter forever by entangling himself with the vicar's daughter, but far more another, the one for whom he had entered orders. The mother had said to Martin, “There is only one way, one single way by which my boy can be saved from ruin and I can obtain peace and forgiveness from my sin.” This task, to atone for the mother by a holy life, had not prevented him from a passionate love for Marie-Liese or from an intrigue with the pastor's daughter, yet, since he had on the latter's account lost his purity, something else was also laid waste thereby, that which had given peace to him and a purpose to his muddled life, the love for his mother. As he tarried already half in the other world, his last words were, “Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast.” This had the mother in her tenderness done to her little boy. We see here the regression to the infantile, to a primitive child libido.

The matter can be followed still further. The walking by moonlight itself did not begin, in spite of every predisposing cause, until Poldl was connected with the new parish and no longer shared the same locality with his beloved. It is not revealed whether the pulpit of the Weissenhofen church looked perhaps in the direction of Rodenstein or not. It seems to me significant that the pastor's daughter crept after Poldl all night long, not perhaps merely the first time, as if she suspected his hidden erotic or feared even that he might go out toward Rodenstein. He must also every midnight establish the fact that, in spite of his sins of the flesh, he considered himself still worthy to be a priest. For the same reason he himself read the mass every day until near the end. Indeed he read this not merely in the daytime but also at midnight when other priests sought rest. And by his behavior in sleep walking it was as if he wished each time anew to justify himself before his Rodenstein parish, and especially before his beloved. The Luther attitude referred to the former, “Though you slay me, I cannot do otherwise!” the outspoken infantile expression, the only words which he actually speaks, “I know of nothing!” is for the latter. Thus a small boy protests his innocence when any one faces him with a misdeed. It was as if he wanted to go back to his beloved, to Marie-Liese, as if to his own mother.

Again we find libidinous and infantile causes as the starting point of moonlight walking and sleep walking. Only the erotic no longer appears so openly as with the other poets but receives a certain disguise. Yet brother Martin, the philosopher of life, recognizes clearly the kernel of the matter: “So I had also to witness the end with him, as with so many of my brothers and sisters. But I still think today this need not have happened, if the mother had permitted him his life as it would have been lived out freely by himself. First she should not have counted it so great as sin, for otherwise there would have been no pitch worker Poldl in the world. Although she thought of it within herself that it was a sin, she should have so looked upon it that she could have settled it with the Lord God. Ah yes! he had to go about in the cowl, which had become a greater sack than a farmer's jumper and there all the sins of others enter, but if no one shall commit one in his own right, how would one find shelter for all these? If I had only at that time been obstinate about the planning of this thing, I would have foreseen the wrong of it and have known that the mother was an old woman, and with many conscience grows when reason is going to sleep. Faith, honor and peace he would never have squandered, for the farmer's position does not play with so high a stake. Still today the little fellow runs gaily about the yard under my eyes.… Ah, you poor sin child, how wantonly was the joy of living destroyed for you!”

“Macbeth,” by Shakespeare.

As I now undertake the analysis of the case of Lady Macbeth, I stand not only before the last but the most difficult portion of my work. Here indeed everything sexual and the erotic itself seem to be quite excluded; and my attempt appears to fail in both directions, in the sexual as well as in the infantile, to apply to Shakespeare's heroine what my psychoanalytically treated cases, as well as all those others from literature have furnished. The poet has devoted no more than one single scene to this entire sleep walking including the grounds for it, and he has said as little of Lady Macbeth's childhood as of her sexual erotic life. Our knowledge of Shakespeare's life is above all so meager, if we turn from the case to the poet himself, that the difficulties tower in our way almost mountain high. The reader will in this case, which presents itself so unfavorably, have to expect neither that certainty nor even that high degree of probability of results, which the earlier examples gave us. Here through no fault of mine all aids to interpretation are wanting. I should consider it as something accomplished if the reader did not say at the close, “The case of Lady Macbeth contradicts all that has been heretofore discovered,” as it will appear at first. We will begin with the literary source for Macbeth, Holinshed's “History of Scotland.”[33] Shakespeare confined himself so closely to this that he took over accurately, even to the dialogue, whole scenes into his tragedy. The deviations are for this reason so much the more interesting. In the chronicle Macbeth is simply the tyrant. At the very beginning it is said of him, “he would certainly have been held as the most worthy of rulers, if his nature had not had so strong a tendency to cruelty.” His cruelty is frequently emphasized, both at the bier of the dead Macdowald and toward the dwellers in the western isles, who “called him a bloodthirsty tyrant and the cruel murderer of those to whom the king's grace had granted their lives.” Finally also in the camp of the Danes when they were overcome “he wrought such havoc upon all sides without the least resistance that it was terrible to look upon.” A change seems however to have taken place in his character when, after the murder of Duncan, he had seized the kingdom for himself. “He began to reform the laws and to root out all the irregularities and abuses in the administration.” He freed the land for many years from all robbers, guarded most carefully the church and clergy, and, to put it briefly, was looked upon as the defender and shield of everything blameless. He established also many good laws and ruled the kingdom for ten years with the greatest wisdom and justice.

“This apparent equity and zeal for all that is best was however merely hypocrisy; he wished only to win the favor of the people. Tyrants are always distrustful, they are always afraid that others will rob them of their power by the same unrighteous means by which they themselves have succeeded. As soon as Macbeth discovered any plans against himself, he no longer concealed his intentions but practised and permitted every kind of cruelty.” At first the words of the three sisters of fate lay always in his thoughts. In order to attain to what they had prophesied he was willing to have Banquo and his son murdered. Yet the murderers hired for the purpose killed only the former while Fleance succeeded in escaping. “Luck seems to have deserted Macbeth after the murder of Banquo. None of his undertakings were successful, every one feared for his life and scarcely dared appear before the king. He feared every one and every one feared him, so that he was always seeking opportunity for the execution of suspected persons. His distrust and his cruelty increased day by day, his bloodthirstiness was not to be appeased.… He gave himself over recklessly to his natural ferocity, oppressed his subjects even to the poorest and permitted himself every shameful deed.” Shakespeare has represented the rest fairly truly according to Holinshed, only that in actuality this lasted for seven years, until Macbeth fell at the hands of Macduff.

It is also worthy of note what Holinshed has made the ground of the murder of Duncan. There preceded in the chronicle the promise of the three witches, further Malcolm's appointment as prince of Cumberland and, as a result of this, succession to the kingdom. Now Malcolm could “ascend the throne directly after his father's death, while in the old laws it was provided that the nearest relative would be placed upon the throne, if, at the death of his predecessor, the prince who was called to the succession was not yet capable of ruling.” This latter had happened to Macbeth, Duncan's cousin. “Then began Macbeth, from whom by this arrangement of the king all hope of the throne was taken, to consider the means whereby he could seize the crown by force for himself. For he believed that Duncan had done him a great wrong, when he named his infant son as successor to his throne and had so annulled all other claims. Moreover the words of the witches encouraged him to his purpose. But foremost of all his wife, a proud and haughty woman, who longed with most burning desire after the name of queen, would not desist until she had strengthened him to the uttermost in his intention.” This last sentence is the chronicler's only notice of Lady Macbeth.

We can now measure what Shakespeare has contributed himself to her character as well as to that of her husband. At first the absolute cruelty, which with Holinshed was the chief trait of his character, is wanting in Macbeth, and therefore ambition is mentioned first. Macbeth becomes the tyrant wading in blood first after the murder of Duncan and then more from a necessity to defend himself. His own wife characterizes best the earlier hero:

Yet Macbeth at bottom dared not murder the king, he only toyed with the thought. He must be instigated from without, if the deed is not to be put off until the Greek calends. Lady Macbeth from the very beginning feels it her task to strengthen her laggard and doubting husband in his ambition. This Shakespeare had already found in Holinshed. As the chronicle has pictured it: “Still more did his wife urge him on to attack the king, for she was exorbitantly ambitious and burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen.”[34] While she thus incited her husband, she fulfilled yet more the longing of her own heart:

She summons herself also to the task, calls the evil spirits of the air to her aid and will become a man, since her husband is no man:

When Macbeth announces, “Duncan comes here to-night,” she asks sinisterly, “And when goes hence?”—Macbeth: “To-morrow—as he purposes.”—Lady Macbeth:

It may be seen that the really cruel one is here first Lady Macbeth and not her husband. He on the contrary must always torture himself with scruples and doubts. He constantly holds before himself the outward results of his deed, brings everything together which should protect Duncan from his dagger and can only say in regard to the opposite course:

And he explains to his wife, “We will proceed no further in this business.” Then must Lady Macbeth rebuke him as a coward, no longer trust his love, if he, when time and place so wait upon him, retract from his purpose. She lays on the strongest accent, yes, uses the “word of fury”:

and finally develops the entire plan and promises her assistance, before she can persuade her husband to the murder.

She has stupefied the two chamberlains, upon whom the guilt shall be rolled, with spiced wine and drunk herself full of courage for the deed, as so many criminals.

Then she hears Macbeth within at his gruesome work uttering a terrified question, and continues:

Then her husband appears with the daggers. As he looks at his bloody hands a cry is wrung from him, “This is a sorry sight.” Yet the Lady repulses him harshly, “A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.”

Macbeth:

Lady Macbeth quiets him but he weakens his high courage by brooding over the deed.

Then however as her husband refuses to look again upon his deed Lady Macbeth herself seizes the daggers:

Macbeth (alone):

Lady Macbeth (returning):

But the horrid deed has not brought the expected good fortune. After Duncan's murder Macbeth finds no rest and no sleep: “To be thus, is nothing; But to be safely thus.” So he first considers removing Banquo and his son. But Lady Macbeth is little content:

Then comes her husband. All night he has been so shaken with terrible dreams that he would rather be in Duncan's place, “Than on the torture of the mind to lie, In restless ecstasy.” Lady Macbeth tries here to comfort him with the only tender impulse in the drama:

Macbeth promises to do as she asks and charges her to treat Banquo especially with distinction. Nor does he conceal from her what now tortures him most, “Dear wife, Thou knowest that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.” And immediately the Lady is her old self: “But in them nature's copy's not eterne.” Though Lady Macbeth is represented as at once prepared for a second murder, Macbeth has now no more need of her: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed.”

Yet, although he shrinks back no longer from any sort of evil deed, he does so before the horrible pictures of his phantasies, the hallucinations of his unconscious. Here is where Shakespeare's genius enters. The Macbeth of the Chronicle commits throughout all his acts of horror apparently in cold blood. At least nothing to the contrary is reported. With Shakespeare on the other hand Macbeth, who is represented in the beginning as more ambitious than cruel, is pathologically tainted. From his youth on he suffered from frequent visions, which, for example, caused him to see before Duncan's murder an imaginary dagger. This “strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me,” comes to light most vividly on the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet. Lady Macbeth must use all her presence of mind to save at least the outward appearance. With friendly exhortation, yet with grim reproof and scornful word, she attempts to bring her husband to himself. In this last scene, when she interposes in Macbeth's behavior, she stands completely at the height. Not until the guests have departed does she grow slack in her replies. In truth neither her husband's resolution to wade on in blood nor his word that strange things haunt his brain can draw from her more than the response, “You lack the season of all natures, sleep.” It seems as if she had collapsed exhausted after her tremendous psychical effort.

Shakespeare has in strange fashion told us nothing of what goes on further in her soul, though he overmotivates everything else, even devotes whole scenes to this one purpose. We first see her again in the last act in the famous sleep walking scene. She begins to walk in her sleep, falls ill with it one might well say, just on that day when Macbeth goes to war. Her lady in waiting saw her from this day on, at night, “rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”—“A great perturbation in nature! to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching,” the evidently keen sighted physician thinks. He soon has the opportunity to observe the Lady's sleep walking for himself. She comes, in her hand a lighted candle, which at her express command must be always burning near her bed. Her eyes are open as she walks, but their sense is shut. Then she rubs her hands together as if to wash them, which she does according to the statement of the lady in waiting, often continuously for a quarter of an hour.

Now they hear her speaking: “Yet here's a spot. Out damned spot! out, I say!—One, two, why, then 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?—The Thane of Fife had a wife; Where is she now?—What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.—Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! oh! oh!—Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale;—I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he cannot come out of his grave.—To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” After such appearances she always in fact goes promptly to bed. The physician who observes her pronounces his opinion: “This disease is beyond my practice. Yet have I known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds.” Here however there seems to be something different:

And then as if he were a psychoanalyst:

Also he answers Macbeth, who inquires after the condition of the patient.

Yet as the king's star declines neither the doctor's foresight nor his skill prevents Lady Macbeth, the “diabolical queen” from laying hands upon herself.

This case of sleep walking, if we consider it, seems first to correspond entirely to the popular view, that the wanderer carries over to the nighttime the activities of the day, or to speak more correctly, of the most important day of the last month. We saw in the first act how she reproaches Macbeth for his cowardice, encourages him and controls his actions. Only in two points, very significant ones to be sure, does it appear that she has now taken over her husband's rÔle upon herself; in the disturbance of her sleep and the concern for the blood upon her hands. How had she rebuffed Macbeth when he had called out in regard to his bloody hands, “This is a sorry sight!” It was only a foolish thought. “Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.” But Macbeth was not to be shaken, the entire ocean would not suffice. Rather would the king's blood, which he had shed, change its green to glowing red. Yet when Lady Macbeth completes his work for him, she remarks lightly, “My hands are of your color; but I shame To wear a heart so white.… A little water clears us of this deed.” In her sleep walking itself she encourages her husband, “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown.” She seeks however in vain in this very sleep walking to wipe the stains from her hands, they smell always of blood and not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten her hands. Must not the inner meaning of all her sleep walking lie exactly in these two points, in which she has so completely turned about?

It must be observed that in the tragedy as in the previously related tale of the “Sin Child” the sleep walking does not begin in childhood nor in puberty, but in both instances in somewhat more mature years, and, what is significant, as an illness, more precisely a psychic illness. The sin child fell ill because he had lost his pure beloved one, who had taken the place of his mother, the original love object of his earliest childhood; and Lady Macbeth, who had herself become queen through a murder, falls ill just at that moment when her lord must go to the battlefield to defend his life and his crown. For not without reason the fate of Macduff's wife, who was slain when her husband had gone from her, occurs to her also when she, while wandering, speaks of the much blood which Duncan had. Therefore it seems likely, and is in fact generally believed, that Lady Macbeth becomes ill because of her anxiety for life and kingdom. Only the facts do not strictly agree with this. In the first place her husband's campaign is by no means unpromising. On the contrary he has heard from the witches that his end would be bound with apparently unfulfillable conditions, so unfulfillable that the prophecy at once frees him from all fear.

Having hidden nothing from the “partner of his greatness” he would scarcely conceal the promise of the witches, which increased his confidence to the uttermost. Besides it cannot be fear and anxiety which brings on her night wandering. Another current explanation also seems to me to have little ground. As Brandes has recently interpreted it, “The sleep walking scene shows in the most remarkable fashion how the pricking of an evil conscience, when it is dulled by day, is more keen at night and robs the guilty one of sleep and health.” Now severe pangs of conscience may well disturb sleep, but they would hardly create sleep walking. Criminals are hardly noctambulists. Macbeth himself is an example how far stings of conscience and remorse can lead a sensitive man. He has no more rest after he has murdered the king and Banquo, yet he does not become a sleep walker. There must be another cause here which precipitates Lady Macbeth's sleep walking.

We will first examine the relation of husband and wife to one another in order to trace out this mystery. The character of Lady Macbeth has caused many a one in Germany to rack his brains since the time of Tieck. Up till that time she passed simply as Megaera, as an “arch witch,” as Goethe calls her. This opinion prevailed not only in Germany but in the English motherland too. But this view went against the grain with the German spirit. Therefore Ludwig Tieck first looked upon Lady Macbeth as a tender, loving wife. From this time on there arose critics and even poets, who in the same way wished to wash her clean. I will cite the two most important, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Rudolf Hans Bartsch. The former, of whom I explained earlier, that he did not hesitate to make an interpolation to prove his point, sums up his judgment in the following sentences: “It is not ambition alone that moves her, but love which would see her lord become great” (p.78). And in a second place, “She loved her husband and had sacrificed her conscience more for him than for herself” (p.124). R.H. Bartsch goes much further in his romance, “Elisabeth KÖtt.” Wigram says to the heroine, “Do you not feel how she (Lady Macbeth) before everything that she says cannot hitch horses enough to carry her slow and immovable lord along?” In the sleep walking scene “the utter crushing of this poor, overburdened heart burst forth in the torture of the dream wandering.” At the close he pronounces his opinion: “If there is a poor weak woman upon earth, so it is this arch enchantress, who loves her husband so much that she has in admirable fashion studied all his faults and weaknesses that she may cover over the deficiencies with her trembling body. Seek the wife in her rÔle!”

What truth is there in these viewpoints? The poet himself has been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which Shakespeare so frequently followed literally. According to this Lady Macbeth was extravagantly ambitious and when she continually urged Macbeth to murder Duncan, this was only because she “burned with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen.” There is never a syllable of a feeling of love for her husband, or that she desired the crown only for his sake. This objection might be made here, that as Shakespeare has often gone beyond his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Macbeth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be a priori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double significance from the poet of “Romeo and Juliet.” He who could give such language to love would not have completely denied it in “Macbeth,” if Lady Macbeth was to have been a loving wife. One can find everything in her words, warning, entreaty and adjuration, upbraidings and threatenings, anger, yes, almost abuse, yet not one natural note of love.

This has a so much harsher effect since her husband approaches her usually as an actual lover, or more accurately stated up to the murder of Banquo. She is warm only where it concerns the attainment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. She is always to her husband “my dearest partner of my greatness” as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. I suspect that the authors who all the way through see in her the loving spouse are expressing their own complexes, their own unconscious wishes. Such an one as Bartsch for example cannot think otherwise of a woman than as unfolding lovingly to the man.

Lady Macbeth makes upon me, in her relation toward her frequently wooing husband as it were, the impression of a natura frigida, that is a sexually cold woman. If one takes her own frightful word for it, that she could tear the breast from her own sucking child and dash its brains out, then the mother love seems never to have been strong within her, but rather whatever feeling she has possessed has been changed to passionate ambition. Now psychoanalytic experience teaches that when a woman remains sexually cold toward a sympathetic and potent man, this goes back to an early sealing up of affect with a forbidden, because an incest object. Such women have almost always from their tenderest infancy on loved father or brother above all and never through all their lives freed themselves from this early loved object. Though at puberty compelled to cut them off as sexual objects, yet they have held fast to them in the unconscious and become incapable of transferring to another man. It is possible also in the case of Lady Macbeth to think of such an indissoluble bond. Moreover certain features in the sleep walking scene seem to speak directly of a repressed sexual life.

Lady Macbeth wanders at night, since her husband has left her and marital intercourse has been broken off.[36] In her hand is a lighted candle, which according to her express command must burn near her bed, and only now for the first time, otherwise the lady in waiting would not have laid such stress upon the fact. The candle in her hand, that is a feature which up till now we have met in none of our cases, but which, as a glance into literature teaches me, is by no means infrequently found with sleep walkers. It can hardly be considered a mere accident that Shakespeare discovered just this characteristic, which is really atypical. One would be much more inclined to suspect in it a secret, hidden meaning. Then at once a connection forces itself. We know from the infantile history of so many people that a tenderly solicitous parent, the father or the mother, likes to convince himself or herself, with a candle in the hand, that the child is asleep.[37] Then we would have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Macbeth, after her husband had gone to the war, has a lighted candle always burning near her bed, and why then she wanders around like a ghost with it at night.

The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking contains a second unmistakably sexual relationship. Here she repeats not less than five times the demand upon her husband, “To bed,” while in the corresponding murder scene (II, 2) it simply reads, “Retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed.” The further repetition, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,” sounds again infantile through and through. So one speaks to a child, scarcely to an adult. It seems as if she takes the father or the mother by the hand and bids them go to bed. One recognizes already in this passage that this atypical sleep walking of Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the sexual and the infantile. It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the repressed, because strongly forbidden, sexual wishes of Lady Macbeth are directed. Who else could it be but her own father, the original love object of every little girl; what other person of her childhood, who later becomes an unsuitable sexual object, but yet hinders for all the future the transference of love over to the husband? This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of childhood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents and in the second place the brothers and sisters. Here the polar attraction of the sexes holds in the relation of the elder to the younger and vice versa, that is the attraction of the man to the woman and the woman to the man. It is “a natural tendency,” says Freud[38] in the “Interpretation of Dreams,” “for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it.… Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time reinforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs.”

We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the love, every child in the period of innocence wants to “marry” the former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little five year old daughter. She began, “I want to get married.”—“To whom?”—“To you, Papa.”—“I already have a wife.”—“Then you would have two wives.”—“That won't do.”—“Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you.” And Freud relates (p.219), “An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. ‘Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,’ and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, … says outright: ‘Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.’”

We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of sexual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from him. Her sexuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen,[39] in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest. The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the glowing intensity of her sexual wishes.

With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan. “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't.” This physical likeness signifies identity of individuals, as we know from many analogous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic.

Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death:

Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the rÔle of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!” and bade her go to bed.

Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the murder of the king as he does in the history? I believe that we must here go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shakespeare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes “cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself; we can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become as black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phantasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately reËchoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices.”

This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Essex and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned to death because of treason against the life of the king. According to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later, made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it recalled. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius CÆsar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all revolve about a father murder. In “Julius CÆsar,” Brutus murders his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved (“And thou too, my son Brutus?”). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as Freud explains in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” had at bottom done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last analysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful dramas.

Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this point, will stop here indignant: “How could any one maintain that a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, even if only in the phantasies of childhood?” I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to “marry” the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. “If the little boy,” says Freud in the “Interpretation of Dreams,”[40] “is allowed to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's experience has taught him that ‘dead’ folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return.”Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to wish his parents dead? We may answer “that the childish idea of ‘being dead’ has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing.… Fear of death is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word.… Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as ‘being gone,’ not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by traveling, estrangement or death.… If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die.”[41] It may be conjectured, if we apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as well as of their later reappearances in the great dramas.

The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shakespeare. This other side of his childish impulse leads for example to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. Once more I let Brandes express it: “The object of Shakespeare's desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social advance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material fortune and official respect. He held passionately from his youth up to the purpose to reËstablish the name and the position of his family.… His father had not dared to go along the streets, fearing to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member of the lesser nobility.… In the year 1596 his father, apparently at his instigation and with his support, entered a petition at Heralds College for the bestowal of a coat of arms. The granting of the coat of arms signified the ceremonial entry into the gentry.” The ambition of the small child is to become as great as the father, and so later that of the man is to exalt the father himself, to make him king. One sees how close and how very personal the theme of ambition was to Shakespeare.

Before I go on to analyze further what the poet has woven into his treatment of “Macbeth” from his own purely personal experience, we must first consider a technical factor which is common to all dramatists. It has been discovered that Shakespeare projected his own complexes into his tragedies, complexes which are in no way simple, but which show, for example, close to the hatred even as great a love as well as other contrary elements. He is fond of separating his dramatic projection into two personalities wherever his feeling is an ambivalent one, these two forms standing in contrast to one another. He splits his ego into two persons, each of which corresponds to only one single emotional impulse. That is a discovery which of course was not made for the first time by psychoanalysis. Minor, for instance, writes in his book on Schiller: “Only in conjunction with Carlos does Posa represent Schiller's whole nature, the wild passion of the one is the expression of the sensual side, the noble exaltation of the other the stoical side of his nature.… Schiller has not drawn this figure from external nature; it has not come to him from without but he has taken it deep from his inner being.” Otto Ludwig expresses himself similarly: “Goethe often separates a man into two poetic forms, Faust-Mephisto, Clavigo-Carlos.”

It is plainly to be seen, if we apply our recognition of this fact to Shakespeare, that he has projected his ego affect into Macbeth as well as his wife, which gives numerous advantages. So far we have considered Lady Macbeth merely as a complete dramatic character, which she is first of all. Besides this nevertheless she surely corresponds to a splitting of Shakespeare's affect, for the poet incorporates in her his instincts for ruthless ambition. He has worked over the character already given her by the Chronicle for his own exculpation. It was stated previously that Macbeth in the first two acts is by no means the bloodthirsty tyrant of Holinshed and really stands far behind his wife in ambition. It is as if our poet, who plainly stands behind his hero, wished thereby to say, I am not capable of a father murder and would surely have put it off or not have accomplished it at all, if I had not been compelled by a woman's influence. Macbeth will go no further in the affair in spite of all favorable outward circumstances, but it is Lady Macbeth who forces the deed to completion. The final cause of every father hatred is rivalry in regard to the mother and so it was she, represented by Lady Macbeth, who in his phantasy would have urged the infantile Shakespeare to put his father out of the way. Here branches out another path for the sleep walking. We have so far spoken only of the father who comes at night to the child, but now Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep, seems also to represent Shakespeare's mother, who with the candle in her hand convinces herself that her darling child is sleeping soundly.[42]

It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing. There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are according to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation without exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with single causes. So manifold a chain of circumstances, those that lie near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play in most, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to assert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. Dream analysis at once proves this. One can almost always rightfully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpretations are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well motivated.

We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depression under which he labored just at the time when he created his greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and even possibly—we know so little of his life—walked in his sleep? The poet always hastened to repress[43] whatever personal revelations threatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful deed, the king and father murder:

This must have referred to Shakespeare as much as to his hero. Moreover the writing and sealing of the letter at the beginning of the sleep walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady Macbeth had a secret, a confession to make—in the name of the poet. I think also at the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed drives her to suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual creator, for his own self punishment.[44]

There remain yet only one or two points to be touched upon and explained. No discussion is needed for the fact that an outspoken sadistic nature in Lady Macbeth leads her to walk in her sleep, indeed, disposes her to it. We can easily understand also that this breaks forth just at the moment when her husband sets out, that is, translated into the infantile, when Macbeth, or in the deeper layer her own father, dies. It is much more necessary to explain why immediately after the deed she has no scruples in staining the chamberlains with Duncan's blood and takes the affair so lightly, while later she is never rid of the fear of the blood and is always striving in vain to wash her hands clean. Here it must be again recalled that Lady Macbeth on the one hand represents the actual wife of Macbeth, on the other hand the poet himself and in two epochs of his life; Shakespeare first in his unrestrained striving and then when he is brought low, shaken in his very depths by the death of his father. Murder phantasies toward his father came to him as a boy and then as a youth at the beginning of puberty, and yet at neither time was he ill. The more mature man however, borne down more heavily by life, met by the actual death of his father, broke down under the weight of things. This explains in the last analysis the change in the attitude of Lady Macbeth.

I do not know how far the reader is willing to follow me. Yet one thing I believe I have proved, that also in Lady Macbeth's sleep walking the erotic is not wanting nor the regression into the infantile.