type of the developing character, is the central factor
in the situation. We see and interpret the situation only through the
personality of Markheim himself. Another murderer might have acted
differently, even with those clamorous clocks and accusing mirrors
around him, but not this murderer. There is nothing abnormal about him,
however, as a criminal. He is thirty-six years old and through sheer
weakness has gone steadily downward, but he has never before done a deed
approaching this in horror or in the power of sudden self-revelation. He
sees himself now as he never saw himself before and begins to take stock
of his moral assets. They are pitifully meager, though his opportunities
for character building have been good. He has even had emotional
revivals, which did not, however, issue in good deeds. But with it all,
Markheim illustrates the nobility of human nature rather than its
essential depravity. I do not doubt his complete and permanent
conversion. When the terrible last question is put to him--or when he
puts it to himself--whether he is better now in any one particular than
he was, and when he is forced to say, "No, in none! I have gone down in
all," the moral resources of human nature itself seem to be exhausted.
But they are not. "I see clearly what remains for me," said Markheim,
"by way of _duty_." This word, not used before, sounds a new challenge
and marks the crisis of the story. Duty can fight without calling in
reserves from the past and without the vision of victory in the future.
I don't wonder that the features of the visitant "softened with a tender
triumph." The visitant was neither "the devil" as Markheim first thought
him nor "the Saviour of men" as a recent editor pronounces him. He is
only Markheim's old self, the self that entered the antique shop, that
with fear and trembling committed the deed, and that now, half-conscious
all the time of inherent falseness, urges the old arguments and tries to
energize the old purposes. It is this visitant that every man meets and
overthrows when he comes to himself, when he breaks sharply with the old
life and enters resolutely upon the new.]

"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some
customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior
knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that
the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he
continued, "I profit by my virtue."

Markh