or propped against the side of the ticket-booth must remain our first
memory of Charlie Chaplin. The splay feet, the moustache, the derby
hat, the rattan walking-stick, composed at once the image which was
ten years later to become the universal symbol of laughter. “_I am
here to-day_” was his legend, and like everything else associated
with his name it is faintly ironic and exactly right. The man who,
of all the men of our time, seems most assured of immortality, chose
that particularly transient announcement of his presence, “I am here
to-day,” with its emotional overtone of “gone to-morrow,” and there is
always something in Charlie that slips away. “He does things,” said
John S. Sargent once, “and you’re lucky if you see them.” Incredibly
lucky to live when we have the chance to see them.
It is a miracle that there should arise in our time a figure wholly
in the tradition of the great clowns--a tradition requiring creative
energy, freshness, inventiveness, change--for neither the time nor the
country in which Charlie works is exceptionally favourable to such a
phenomenon. Stranger still is the course he has run. It is simple to
take _The Kid_ as the dividing line, but it is more to the point to
consider the phases of Charlie’s popularity, for each phase corresponds
to one of the attacks now being made upon his integrity. He is on the
top of the world, an exposed position, and we are all sniping at him;
even his adherents are inclined to say that “after all” he is “still”
this or the other thing. One goes to his pictures as one went to hear
Caruso, with a ghoulish speculation as to the quantity of alloy in the
“golden voice.” It is because Charlie has had all there ever was of
acclaim that he is now surrounded by deserters.
[Illustration: CHARLIE CHAPLIN. By E. E. Cummings]
That he exists at all is due to the camera and to the selective genius
of Mack Sennett. It is impossible to dissociate him entirely from the
Keystone comedy where he began and worked wonders and learned much.
The injustice of forgetting Sennett and the Keystone when thinking
of Chaplin has undermined most of the intellectual appreciation of
his work, for although he was the greatest of the Keystone comedians
and passed far beyond them, the first _and decisive_ phase of his
popularity came while he was with them, and the Keystone touch remains
in all his later work, often as its most precious element. It was
the time of Charlie’s actual contact with the American people, the
movie-going populace before the days of the great moving pictures.
He was the second man to be known widely by name--John Bunny was the
first--and he achieved a fame which passed entirely by word of mouth
into the category of the common myths and legends of America, as the
name of Buffalo Bill had passed before. By the time the newspapers
recognized the movie as a source of circulation, Charlie was
already a known quantity in the composition of the American mind and,
what is equally significant, he had created the first _Charlot_. The
French name which is and is not Charlie will serve for that figure
on the screen, the created image which is, and at the same time is
more than, Charlie Chaplin, and is less. Like every great artist in
whatever medium, Charlie has created the mask of himself--many masks,
in fact--and the first of these, the wanderer, came in the Keystone
comedies. It was there that he first detached himself from life and
began to live in another world, with a specific rhythm of his own, as
if the pulse-beat in him changed and was twice or half as fast as that
of those who surrounded him. He created then that trajectory across the
screen which is absolutely his own line of movement. No matter what
the actual facts are, the curve he plots is always the same. It is of
one who seems to enter from a corner of the screen, becomes entangled
or involved in a force greater than himself as he advances upward and
to the centre; there he spins like a marionette in a whirlpool, is
flung from side to side, always in a parabola which seems centripetal
until the madness of the action hurls him to refuge or compels him to
flight at the opposite end of the screen. He wanders in, a stranger, an
impostor, an anarchist; and passes again, buffeted, but unchanged.
The Keystone was the time of his wildest grotesquerie (after _Tillie’s
Punctured Romance_, to be sure), as if he needed, for a beginning,
sharply to contrast his rhythm, his gait, his gesture, _mode_, with
the actual world outside. His successes in this period were confined
to those films in which the world intruded with all its natural
crassness upon his detached existence. There was a film in which
Charlie dreamed himself back into the Stone Age and played the God of
the Waters--wholly without success because he contrasted his fantasy
with another fantasy in the same tempo, and could neither sink into
nor stand apart from it. But in _His Night Out_ the effect is perfect,
and is intensified by the alternating coincidence and syncopation of
rhythm in which Ben Turpin worked with him. Charlie’s drunken line
of march down a stairway was first followed in parallel and then
in not-quite-parallel by Turpin; the degree of drunkenness was the
same, then varied, then returned to identity; and the two, together,
were always entirely apart from the actuality of bars and hotels and
fountains and policemen which were properties in their existence.
In this early day Charlie had already mastered his principles. He
knew that the broad lines are funny and that the fragments--which
are delicious--must “point” the main line of laughter. I recall,
for example, an exquisite moment at the end of this film. Turpin is
staggering down the street, dragging Charlie by the collar. Essentially
the funny thing is that one drunkard should so gravely, so soberly,
so obstinately take care of another and should convert himself into a
policeman to do it; it is funny that they should be going nowhere, and
go so doggedly. The lurching-forward body of Turpin, the singular angle
formed with it by Charlie’s body almost flat on the ground, added to
the spectacle. And once as they went along Charlie’s right hand fell
to one side, and as idly as a girl plucks a water-lily from over the
side of a canoe he plucked a daisy from the grass border of the path,
and smelled it. The function of that gesture was to make everything
that went before, and everything that came after, seem funnier; and it
succeeded by creating another, incongruous image out of the picture
before our eyes. The entire world, a moment earlier, had been aslant
and distorted and wholly male; it righted itself suddenly and created
a soft idyll of tenderness. Nearly everything of Charlie is in that
moment, and I know no better way to express its elusive quality than
to say that as I sat watching the film a second time, about two hours
later, the repetition of the gesture came with all the effect of
surprise, although I had been wondering whether he could do it so
perfectly again.
This was the Charlie whom little children came to know before any other
and whose name they added to their prayers. He was then popular with
the people; he was soon to become universally known and admired--the
Charlie of _The Bank_ and of _Shoulder Arms_; and finally he became
“the great artist” in _The Kid_. The second period is pure development;
the third is change; and the adherents of each join with the earlier
enthusiasts to instruct and alarm their idol. No doubt the middle phase
is the one which is richest in memory. It includes the masterpieces _A
Dog’s Life_, _The Pawnshop_, _The Vagabond_, _Easy Street_, as well as
the two I have just mentioned, and, if I am not mistaken, the _genre_
pictures like _The Floorwalker_, _The Fireman_, _The Immigrant_, and
the fantastic _Cure_. To name these pictures is to call to mind their
special scenes, the atmosphere in which they were played: the mock
heroic of _The Bank_ and its parody of passion; the unbelievable scene
behind the curtain in _A Dog’s Life_; Charlie as policeman in _Easy
Street_, which had some of the beginnings of _The Kid_; Charlie left
marking time alone after the squad had marched away in the film which
made camp life supportable. Compare them with the very earliest films,
_The Pile Driver_ and the wheel-chairman film and so on: the later ones
are richer in inventiveness, the texture is more solid, the emotions
grow more complex, and the interweaving of tenderness and gravity
with the fun becomes infinitely more deft. In essence it is the same
figure--he is still a vagrant, an outsider; only now when he becomes
entangled in the lives of other people he is a bit of a crusader, too.
The accidental does not occur so frequently; the progress of each
film is plotted in advance; there is a definite rise and fall as in
_A Dog’s Life_, where the climax is in the curtain scene toward which
tends the first episode of the dog and from which the flight and the
rustic idyll flow gently downward. The pace in the earlier pictures
was more instinctive. In _The Count_ the tempo is jerky; it moves from
extreme to extreme. Yet one gets the sense of the impending flight
beautifully when, at the close, Charlot as the bogus count has been
shown up and is fleeing pell-mell through every room in the house;
the whole movement grows tense; the rate of acceleration perceptibly
heightens as Charlot slides in front of a vast birthday cake, pivots on
his heel, and begins to play alternate pool and golf with the frosting,
making every shot count like a machine gunner barricaded in a pill-box
or a bandit in a deserted cabin.
It was foreordained that the improvised kind of comedy should give way
to something more calculated, and in Charlie’s case it is particularly
futile to cry over spilled milk because for a long time he continued to
give the _effect_ of impromptu; his sudden movements and his finds in
the way of unsuspected sources of fun are exceptional to this day. In
_The Pawnshop_[5] Charlie begins to sweep and catches in his broom the
end of a long rope, which, instead of being swept away, keeps getting
longer, actively fighting the broom. I have no way to prove it, but I
am sure from the context that this is all he had originally had in mind
to do with the scene. Suddenly the tape on the floor creates something
in his mind, and Charlie transforms the back room of the pawnshop into
a circus, with himself walking the tight rope--a graceful, nimble
balancing along the thin line of tape on the floor, the quick turn
and coming forward, the conventional bow, arms flung out, smiling,
to receive applause at the end. Again, as ever, he has created an
imaginary scene out of the materials of the actual.
The plotting of these comedies did not destroy Charlie’s inventiveness
and made it possible for him to develop certain other of his
characteristics. The moment the vagrant came to rest, the natural
man appeared, the paradoxical creature who has the wisdom of simple
souls and the incalculable strength of the weak. Charlie all through
the middle period is at least half Tyl Eulenspiegl. It is another
way for him to live apart from the world by assuming that the world
actually means what it says, by taking every one of its conventional
formulas, its polite phrases and idioms, with dreadful seriousness.
He has created in Charlot a radical with an extraordinarily logical
mind. Witness Charlot arriving late at the theatre and stepping on the
toes of a whole row of people to his seat at the far end; the gravity
of his expressions of regret is only matched by his humiliation when
he discovers that he is, after all, in the wrong row and makes his
way back again and all through the next row to his proper place.
It is a careful exaggeration of the social fiction that when you
apologise you can do anything to anyone. The same feeling underlies
the characteristic moment when Charlot is fighting and suddenly stops,
takes off his hat and coat, gives them to his opponent to hold, and
then promptly knocks his obliging adversary down. Revisiting once an
old Charlie, I saw him do this, and a few minutes later saw the same
thing in a new Harold Lloyd; all there is to know of the difference
between the two men was to be learned there; for Lloyd, who is a clever
fellow, made it seem a smart trick so to catch his enemy off guard,
while Chaplin made the moment equal to the conventional crossing of
swords or the handshake before a prize fight. Similarly, the salutation
with the hat takes seriously a social convention and carries it as far
as it can go. In _Pay Day_ Charlot arrives late to work and attempts
to mollify the furious construction-gang boss by handing him an Easter
lily.
_The Kid_ was undoubtedly a beginning in “literature” for Charlie. I
realize that in admitting this I am giving the whole case away, for
in the opinion of certain critics the beginning of literature is the
end of creative art. This attitude is not so familiar in America, but
in France you hear the Charlot of _The Kid_ spoken of as “theatre,”
as one who has ceased to be of the film entirely. I doubt if this is
just. Like the one other great artist in America (George Herriman, with
whom he is eminently in sympathy), Charlie has always had the Dickens
touch, a thing which in its purity we do not otherwise discover in our
art. Dickens himself is mixed; only a part of him is literature, and
that not the best, nor is that part essentially the one which Charlie
has imported to the screen. _The Kid_ had some bad things in it: the
story, the halo round the head of the unmarried mother, the quarrel
with the authorities; it had an unnecessary amount of realism and its
tempo was uncertain, for it was neither serious film nor Keystone. Yet
it possessed moments of unbelievable intensity and touches of high
imagination. The scenes in and outside the doss-house were excellent
and were old Charlie; the glazier’s assistant was inventive and the
training of Coogan to look like his foster-father was beautiful. Far
above them stood the beginning of the film: Charlot, in his usual
polite rags, strolling down to his club after his breakfast (it would
have been a grilled bone) and, avoiding slops as Villon did, twirling
his cane, taking off his fingerless gloves to reach for his cigarette
case (a sardine box), and selecting from the butts one of quality,
_tamping it_ to shake down the excess tobacco at the tip--all of this,
as Mr Herriman pointed out to me, was the creation of the society
gentleman, the courageous refusal to be undermined by slums and poverty
and rags. At the end of the film there was the vision of heaven:
apotheosis of the long suffering of Charlot at the hands of the police,
not only in _The Kid_--in a hundred films where he stood always against
the authorities, always for his small independent freedom. The world in
which even policemen have wings shatters, too; but something remains.
The invincible Charlot, dazed by his dream, looking for wings on the
actual policeman who is apparently taking him to jail, will not down.
For as they start, a post comes between them, and Charlot, without the
slightest effort to break away, too submissive to fight, still dodges
back to walk round the post and so avoid bad luck. A moment later comes
one of the highest points in Charlie’s career. He is ushered into a
limousine instead of a patrol wagon--it is the beginning of the happy
ending. And as the motor starts he flashes at the spectators of his
felicity a look of indescribable poignancy. It is frightened, it is
hopeful, bewildered; it lasts a fraction of a second and is blurred by
the plate glass of the car. I cannot hope to set down the quality of
it, how it becomes a moment of unbearable intensity, and how one is
breathless with suspense--and with adoration.
For, make no mistake, it is adoration, not less, that he deserves
and has from us. He corresponds to our secret desires because he
alone has passed beyond our categories, at one bound placing himself
outside space and time. His escape from the world is complete and
extraordinarily rapid, and what makes him more than a figure of
romance is his immediate creation of another world. He has the vital
energy, the composing and the functioning brain. This is what makes
him æsthetically interesting, what will make him for ever a school not
only of acting, but of the whole creative process. The flow of his line
always corresponds to the character and tempo; there is a definite
relation between the melody and the orchestration he gives it. Beyond
his technique--the style of his pieces--he has composition, because he
creates anything but chaos in his separate world. “You might,” wrote Mr
Stark Young, wise in everything but the choice of the person addressed,
“you might really create in terms of the moving picture as you have
already created in terms of character.” As I have said, the surest way
to be wrong about Charlie is to forget the Keystone.
This is precisely what Mr Stark Young would like him to do--and what
Charlie may do if the intellectual nonsense about him is capable of
corrupting his natural wisdom and his creative gift. Mr Young has
addressed an open letter to “Dear Mr Chaplin”[6] in which he suggests
that Charlie play _Liliom_ and _He Who Gets Slapped_ and _Peer Gynt_.
(Offended as I am by these ideas, I must be fair. Mr Young does say
that better than all of these, “you could do new things written by or
for you, things in which you would use your full endowment, comic
and otherwise ... develop things calculated strictly for it [the
screen] and for no other art, made up out of its essential quality,
which is visual motion and not mere stage drama photographed....”)
This is, of course, corruption. It means that Mr Young has either not
seen the Charlie of before _The Kid_ (as I suspect from the phrase
about creating in terms of character) or not liked him (which I am
sure about); he has failed to recognize in _The Pawnbroker_ “his full
endowment, comic and otherwise.” It implies to me that Mr Young would
prefer a “serious film” and that suggests the complete absence of a
critical sense, of taste and gusto, of wisdom and gaiety, of piety and
wit. “The larger field” ... “serious efforts” ... “a more cultured
audience” ... “the judicious”--O Lord! these are the phrases which
are offered as bribes to the one man who has destroyed the world and
created it in his own image!
There is a future for him as for others, and it is quite possible that
the future may not be as rich and as dear as the past. I write this
without having seen _The Pilgrim_, which ought to be a test case,
for the two films which followed _The Kid_ (_Pay Day_ and _The Idle
Class_) determined nothing. If the literary side conquers we shall
have a great character actor and not a creator; we shall certainly
not have again the image of riot and fun, the created personage, the
annihilation of actuality; we may go so far as to accomplish Mr Stark
Young’s ideal and have a serious work of art. I hope this will not
happen, because I do not believe that it is the necessary curve of
Charlie’s genius--it is the direction of worldly success, not in money,
but in fame; it is not the curve of life at all. For the slowing-up
of Charlie’s physical energies and the deepening of his understanding
may well restore to him his appreciation of those early monuments to
laughter which are his greatest achievement. He stood then shod in
absurdity, but with his feet on the earth. And he danced on the earth,
an eternal figure of lightness and of the wisdom which knows that the
earth was made to dance on. It was a green earth, excited with its own
abundance and fruitfulness, and he possessed it entirely. For me he
remains established in possession. As it spins under his feet he dances
silently and with infinite grace upon it. It is as if in his whole life
he had spoken only one word: “I am here _to-day_”--the beginning before
time and the end without end of his wisdom and of his loveliness.
_Say It With Music_
SAY IT WITH MUSIC
The popular song is never forgotten--except in public. Great events and
seven-day-wonders pass into oblivion. Hobson, who was a hero, became
a prohibitionist; Aguinaldo, a good citizen; McKinley, a martyr--but
_Good-by, Dolly Gray_, _In the Good Old Summer Time_, and _Just Break
the News to Mother_ are immortal in our private memories and around
them crystallize the sights and sounds and smells, the very quality
of the air we breathed when these songs were in their high day. A
more judicious pen than mine may write about these songs without
sentimentality; I cannot. For in addition to the pathos of time past,
something else brings an air of gentle melancholy to “words and music.”
In recent years a change has come and the popular song is no longer
written to be sung, but to be played. The new song that can’t be sung
has virtues of its own--on the whole they are virtues I prefer. But
I doubt whether it will ever be, as the old song was, a clue to the
social history of our time.
The popular song is so varied, so full of interest, that for a
moment at least one can pretend that it isn’t vulgar, detestable,
the ruin of musical taste, and a symptom of degeneracy; we can
pretend also that _Less Than the Dust_ isn’t more artistic than
_Swanee_. Since the Spanish-American War the American popular song
(including the foreign song popular in America) has undergone the
most interesting modulations; it has expressed everything except _fin
de siècle_. Out of the ’nineties persisted a characteristic song:
_Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, the chorus and tune of which, woven into
mysterious words about “three little niggers in a peanut shell” I
must have heard at the same time as _Daisy_ with its glorification
of the simple life “on a bicycle built for two.” Since then, for a
rough generalization, we have had three types of popular song: the
exotic-romantic, the sentimental, and the raggy-gay. The sentimental
song we have always with us. “That sweet melody with a strong mother
appeal” is advertised on the back of “Those Black Boy Blues” and Irving
Berlin writes _When I Lost You_ between _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and
_Some Sunny Day_. At moments it is dominant and a fake ballad, with
a simple and uninteresting tune, makes _After the Ball_, by Charles
K. Harris, a world wonder. Or we have a simplification of the whole
history of romantic love in _Love Me and the World Is Mine_. The
curious about social life in America may compare this song with _I’m
Just Wild About Harry_.
Beaumarchais, who knew no jazz, makes Figaro say that what can’t be
said can be sung--and this applies far more to the sentimental than to
the obscene. Think of the incredible, the almost unspeakable idea in
the following, presumably spoken by a father to a child:
Down in the City of Sighs and Tears,
Down by the White Light’s Glare,
Down in the something of wasted years,
You’ll find your mamma there!
Or consider the pretty imagery and emotion of _I’m Tying the Leaves_,
as sung by a precocious and abominable child who has been told that
mother will die when the leaves begin to fall. It would be easy to say
that these songs are gone never to return; but it was only two years
ago that _They Needed a Songbird in Heaven--so God Took Caruso Away_
(“idea suggested by George Walter Brown” to the grateful composers). I
do not dare to contemplate _A Baby’s Prayer at Twilight_ or to wonder
what constituted the _Curse of an Aching Heart_; but history has left
on record the chorus of
My Mother was a Lady
Like yours, you will allow,
And you may have a sister
Who needs protection now;
I’ve come to this great city
To find a brother dear,
And you wouldn’t dare insult me, sir,
If Jack were only here.
It was for songs like this that a masterpiece in another _genre_,
the burlesque popular song, was created. I have heard _A Working
Girl Was Leaving Home_ credited to the brothers Smith (the boys the
mother-in-law joke invented, according to George Jean Nathan, and for
their sins they should have written this song) and to the late Tiny
Maxwell, and to an unidentified English source. It’s title and chorus
at least are immortal:
(Then to him these proud words this girl did say):
Stand back, villain; go your way!
Here I will no longer stay.
Although you were a marquis or an earl.
You may tempt the upper classes
With your villainous de-mi tasses,
But Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.
The cure for the sentimental song is the ironic; and irony, it
happens, is not what America lives on. Even so mild an English example
as _Waiting at the Church_ gained its popularity chiefly from the
excellent tag line: