Whiz Bang Editorials
“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet”
Press dispatches recently carried an item to the effect that although slightly mentally affected, the mother of Charlie Chaplin, upon her son’s earnest persuasion, had been allowed to enter this country from England.
Mrs. Chaplin, upon reaching New York, stood a chance, it was stated, of having to return had it not been for quick and effective energies of her sons and their friends in political power.
Those who know Chaplin well declare that the intense melancholy for which he is noted is due more than anything else to the affection and concern for his mother. Such things as domestic troubles, it is said, bear little weight with the man who daily makes millions laugh. ’Tis the mother.
What have we here! Consider this monumental fun-maker of the screen. Death is bad enough but when the mind of one very dear becomes clouded, then indeed does tragedy and sadness smite with a heavy hand.
We read of the circus clown whose wife and children burned to death, and yet, to keep a date with the world of fun lovers, he went ahead that night and clowned as never he had clowned before. Have we in Chaplin a great tragedy also? It will be recalled that when he was a small boy in London he and his mother and brother lived in a workhouse in order that the streets might not be their home.
Now his mother is coming home to him, to live amid all the luxury that great wealth may bring; wealth that came after a sad little fellow with merry feet, living in a workhouse with his mother, learned to be the greatest of all fun-makers. Life’s a funny proposition, folks, isn’t it?
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Half a century ago the nude in art was strange enough in America to uplift Puritanic hands in holy horror. Today, among all cultivated people, the female nude is most matter-of-fact. Our notions of art the country over have been steadily clarifying, until at last the great distinction has been recognized and conceded even by pious folk that, while the human male figure is impossible, the female form is purely beautiful.