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 motive for committing the most detestable of all crimes was that he was behind in his rent!  Even the magazine that gave in fiction form the story of the picture failed to mention what is brought out so strongly in the play—­the innkeeper’s distress at the thought that his wife’s life depended upon his being able to raise the money to send her to the south of France without delay.  The author mentioned that Mathias had a sick wife, but that was all.  The whole treatment of the story in fiction form, moreover, was farcical, such names as “Mr. Parker” being intermingled with those of the well-known characters, “Mathias,” “Christian,” and “Annette,” while the wealthy, dignified Polish Jew was turned into a typical East-side clothing merchant.  The real fault lay with the producer who, ignoring the great and pressing necessity that prompted Mathias’s crime, garbled the original plot to the extent of allowing the innkeeper to murder the Jew because (according to the fiction-version in the magazine) he needed one hundred and seventy-five dollars to pay the rent!  First, last, and all the time you must remember that your story is not a good story if the leading character is not, at all times, deserving of the spectator’s sympathy, even when his action is not worthy of approval.