Each hero must have his opposite, as each great cause must have its protagonist and antagonist.  Indeed, as we have seen, it is this warfare that makes all drama possible.  But it will not do to glorify the doer of evil deeds and thus corrupt the sympathies of the spectators.  The hero and not the “villain” must swing the sympathies of those who see.  Be certain, therefore, that pity for, and even sympathy with, a wrong-doer is not magnified, through the action of your play, into admiration by the onlookers, for in the photoplay as in the legitimate drama the leading character may be a great offender.  This way danger lies, however, and you must walk with extreme caution, or the censors “will catch you—­if you don’t watch out!”—­to say nothing of the lashings of your own conscience.

Without repeating what was said in Chapter XVI regarding the introduction of crime into film stories, we would impress upon the photoplaywright the necessity for always having a fully sufficient, though not necessarily a morally justifiable, motive for any crime that is introduced in a story; besides, the introduction of a crime must be necessary to the action and not a mere spectacular scene.  But remember that it is not sufficient to avoid “crime without motive;” the motive must be one which will, after the crime has been committed, leave no doubt in the mind of the spectator that the crime was virtually inevitable, if not absolutely unavoidable.  If it is the hero of the story who commits the crime, the very greatest care must be taken to show that he had a really powerful motive for his act, if he is to have the sympathy—­though not the approval—­of the audience after yielding to temptation.[29] This, of course, does not refer to deeds of violence which are really not only excusable but actually right, in the circumstances—­like the killing of an attacking desperado in self-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