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.
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