I quote this to show the information already at the command of this astounding lad. All I have heard from Chaplin and from others convinces me, in fact, that his histrionic ability is accompanied by one of those childish minds which work in all directions, which positively have to be held back from learning too much.
One incident in connection with the production of “The Kid” throws into relief Chaplin’s feeling for his small co-star. He was directing the child in a particularly affecting scene when suddenly he turned to Jackie’s father.
“You direct him—I can’t stand it!” he said, turning away quickly. The child’s tears, even though histrionic ones, had been too much for the high-strung, emotional Chaplin.
Charlie’s devotion to Jackie Coogan is explicable to me after one glimpse of the child. So, too, are the words of a certain woman I know. “There is something about that boy,” says the latter, “that always makes me feel like crying. I don’t know why, for he seems so gay and happy.” I myself caught in an instant that same touching, even solemn, quality. What is it? Perhaps because in those wide childish eyes one feels a wisdom brought from some other world and not yet dimmed by that of this.
I feel that I can not bring my recollections of Chaplin to a close at a point more deeply significant of his artist’s nature than the account of my own preview of “The Kid.” When he finished with this picture, attended as it was by his conflict with Mildred Harris, he was in an abysmal state.
“Sam,” said he one day, “I wish when you have nothing else to do you’d come over to my studio and look at my new picture. I’d like to get your opinion of it—advice, too, if you have any to offer.”
“What do you think of it?” I asked him.
“Rotten!” he answered. “I’m awfully discouraged over it.”
I had heard such comments from him before on similar occasions, for by the time that he has finished a story he has so completely lost all sense of perspective that nobody can convince him that the production has one glimmering ray of merit. Consequently I attached no importance to this mood of his. Putting down his words to the divine discontent of genius, I went over that very day with Gouverneur Morris to see “The Kid.”
Even my prejudice in favour of anything that Charlie does did not prepare me for this supreme manifestation of his artistry. Just as the world was afterward to do, Morris and I laughed and cried and gasped as the wonderful story unrolled before us.