-defense.

[Footnote 29: To make this basic motive clear, natural and unforced is
what we call good motivation in fiction and drama.]

As an example of the point we are trying to emphasize, take a story
like "The Bells," the play in which Sir Henry Irving appeared so
often. Mathias the innkeeper, who later became the Burgomaster, was a
character, who, by reason of Irving's superb art, won and held the
sympathies of the audience from the start. Yet after Mathias had
murdered the Polish Jew and robbed him of his belt of gold, even the
art of Irving could not have made us sympathize with the character had
we not been shown that Mathias was urged on to his crime--a crime for
which he was constantly tortured ever afterward, and which occasioned
his tragic death--by two very compelling motives. His primary motive
was the urgent need of money. But he had a two-fold need of money: he
had been notified by the landlord that he must pay his over-due rent
or be turned out of his home; and he had been told by the doctor that
unless he could immediately remove his sick wife to a milder climate
she would certainly die. Thus, impelled by the thought that only by
the speedy acquisition of sufficient money could he hope to save the
life of his wife, he commits the deed which he would never have
committed had his only motive been the necessity for raising money to
pay the rent. Mathias was esteemed by his neighbors as an honest man;
he was a man whose conscience smote him terribly when he was
contemplating the murder of the Jew; and after the crime had been
committed--fifteen years later, in fact--that same guilty conscience,
wracking his very soul, drove him on to his death.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a character with whom we are forced to
sympathize measurably, because we know that he is not naturally a
criminal. Yet, after all, Macbeth is a man who--as Professor Pierce
has pointed out--"has been restrained in the straight path of an
upright life [only] by his respect for conventions." Mathias, on the
other hand, is not held in check by conventions; he is _essentially_
an honest man. He commits a crime, but what stronger motive could a
man have than the one that drove him on to its commission? And
yet--and this is the mistake that we wish to point out to the young
writer--seven years ago a certain company released "The Bells" as a
two-part subject, in which, according to the synopsis published in the
trade journals, Mathias's only mot