THE WORLD'S DESIRE
Reading the terms of the agreement which Charlie Chaplin refused in New York early in 1916 I had a kind of nervous collapse. For we English are not so accustomed to great sums of money as the Americans are. Then I bound a wet towel round my head and studied the figures as dispassionately as it is possible to study figures when they run into kings' ransoms. Charlie was offered ten thousand dollars a week for a year: which came then to £104,000 and is now (1920) much more. He was offered one hundred thousand dollars as a bonus for signing the agreement. He was also offered 50 per cent. of any profits made by his films after his salary had been paid. But it did not satisfy him. He refused it.
Now here is a most remarkable state of affairs—that the popular demand for laughter is such that a little acrobatic man with splay feet and a funny way with a cigarette, a hat, and a cane could be offered and could repudiate such colossal wealth as that, and for no other services than to clown it for the cinematoscope. Nor is the oddity of the matter decreased by the reflection that these figures which make an ordinary person dizzy, belonged to war-time. Charlie Chaplin's rise to affluence and power coincided with the bloodiest struggle in history.
If it is needful for so many people to hold their sides, Charlie's career is justified. He is also the first droll to conquer the whole world. I suppose that it is no exaggeration to say that at any moment of the day and night—allowing for divergences of time—it would be safe to maintain that ten million people are laughing at the Chaplin antics somewhere or other on this planet of ours. For wherever there is a township of more than two thousand inhabitants, there, I imagine, is a cinema; and wherever there is a cinema there is Charlie; not always quite up to date, of course, for managers are wily birds, but in some film, even though an ancient one. Does the Funniest Man on Earth, as he is called, I should like to know, realise what a rôle he fills? Does he stand before the glass and search the recesses of his countenance—which is now far more familiar to the world than any other—and marvel?
Charlie, by the way, has his private uses too. During a recent visit from a young friend, I found that the ordinary gulf that is fixed between a boy in the neighbourhood of ten and a man in the neighbourhood of five times that number was for once easily bridgeable. We found common ground, and very wisely stuck to it, in the circumstance that each of us had seen Charlie, and, by great good fortune, we had each seen him in his latest sketch. Whenever, therefore, a longueur threatened, I had but to mention another aspect of Charlie's genius, and in the discussion that followed all was well.
That Charlie is funny is beyond question. I will swear to that. His humour is of such elemental variety that he could, and probably does, make a Tierra del Fuegan or a Bushman of Central Australia laugh not much less than our sophistical selves. One needs no civilised culture to appreciate the fun of the harlequinade, and to that has Charlie, with true instinct, returned. But it is the harlequinade accelerated, intensified, toned up for the exacting taste of the great and growing "picture" public. It is also farce at its busiest, most furious. Charlie brought back that admirable form of humour which does not disdain the co-operation of fisticuffs, and in which, by way of variety, one man is aimed at, and another, too intrusive, is hit. However long the world may last, it is safe to say that the spectacle of one man receiving a blow meant for another will be popular.
What strikes one quickly is the realisation of how much harder Charlie works than many of the more illustrious filmers. He is rarely out of the picture, he is rarely still, and he gives full measure. There is no physical indignity that he does not suffer—and inflict. Such impartiality is rare in drama, where usually men are either on top or underneath. In the ordinary way our pet comedians must be on top and untouched. Even the clown, though he receives punishment en route, eventually triumphs. But Charlie seldom wins. He remains a butt, or, at any rate, a victim of circumstances whom nothing can discourage or deter. His very essence is resiliency under difficulties, an unabashed and undefeatable front. His especial fascination to me is that life finds him always ready for it—not because he is armed by sagacity, but because he is even better armed by folly. He is first cousin to the village idiot, a natural child of nonsense, licensed up to the hilt, and (like Antæus) every time he rises from a knockdown blow he is the stronger.
It is a proof of the charter which the world has handed to this irresistible humourist that he has been permitted to introduce such an innovation in stage manners as the hitting of women. We only laugh the more when, having had his ears boxed by the fair, he retaliates with double strength. And there is one of his plays in which every audience becomes practically helpless, as after, with great difficulty, extricating a lady in evening dress from a fountain, he deliberately pushes her in again. It required a Charlie Chaplin to make this tolerable; but such is his radiant unworldliness that we accept it as quite legitimate fun.
One of the chief causes—after the personality of the protagonist—of the popularity of the Chaplin films is probably that in them certain things happen which cannot happen in real life without the intervention of the law, and which are almost always withheld from the real stage. I mean that men so freely assault each other; physical violence has the fullest and most abundant play. Every one longs to see kicks and blows administered, but is usually defrauded, and Charlie is a spendthrift with both. And so cheerfully and victoriously does he distribute them that I wonder an epidemic of such attentions has not broken out in both hemispheres. I know this—that a fat policeman with his back towards the exit of a cinema at the time a Chaplin film had ended would be in great danger from my foot were I then leaving. I should hope for enough self-control; but I could promise nothing, and I should feel that Charlie's example, behind the action, sanctified it. Film life and real life would merge into each other so naturally that if the policeman repaid me—or attempted to—in any other way but kind, I should feel outraged. To be arrested for it would be like a stab in the back from a friend.
How long Charlie will remain the darling of two hemispheres we must wait to see. But of one thing I am certain, and that is that if at any time the "The Funniest Man on Earth" ceases to compel laughter, he might by slightly changing his methods draw tears. For while he can be as diverting as the greatest glutton for mirth desires, he has all the machinery of dejection too. One of his melancholy smiles is really beautiful.