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who could support the assertive, cantankerous, ebullient, lachrymose, diabetic, proselytising, hysterical drivel that has tried to make another* saviour, rimmed with tears and tenderness, of a perfectly healthy-minded, ever so slightly bawdy little man, would have to be a bigger fraud than he. It's that vile word — waif ! What a sickeningly maudlin, flatulent strain is revealed in this worship of the pathetic ! What a falsifying of the sound business principle on which Chaplin built his success, namely, that frank sadistic mirth is not too much for a conscience-stricken civilization, be it sugar coated first, dolled up in the appurtenances of pathos, whereby one may wipe away a " furtive " tear with one hand, and cover a grin with the other, and feel the better for it.
Once a Chaplin comedy meant laughter. Then laughter through tears. Then it became a sort of gulping competition. Disgusting! He went too far, not, I am sure, because that was the way he would have chosen, but because he was driven to it by the religious mania of the mob. That is why one must deplore another adulatory chapter, making much of the pathetic element. Who cares a hang about pathos who is himself sunny in disposition ? Chaplin would never have dubbed himself a gutter Galahad in a sunny climate. He would have just knocked about with the rest — the sort of fellow you wouldn't mind standing a drink or a meal — a friendly little muggins with (let it be hoped) a repertoire of dirty stories. Its that greyness that does it, that sciatical Celtic twilight !
And no mention is made of Chaplin as director, as maker of one of the most significant films in history ; where, indeed, he does shine with a brilliance that may approach the genius attributed to him in his far more insignificant capacitv as clown and waif in one.
However, these things happen, and if we begin in a mist — a positively Celtic one — it is a mist from which emerges the rightly appreciated figure of Mack Sennett, to whom so much thanks is due that probably in the future some perfectly ghastly monument will be erected to him, surrounded with Keystone cops and bathing belles in reinforced cement.
There is a very neat chapter on Fairbanks, rightly linking up his infectious heartiness with poetry. " The truth is that under all the acrobatics and mummery, the schoolboy exhuberance and the swagger, there lies in him a streak of pure artistry. I do not think he is himself aware of the fact. I hope he never will be "
Mary Pickford, Lubitsch, " the people's director, the spokesman of and for the mass," Von Stroheim, with " a flair for polished sensuality . . . a courteous old-school viciousness that excites the admiration of a new world cruder in crime," Nazimova, " poised and balanced, on the tip of movement like some Hermes in bas-relief," and Walt Disney, complete the American scene. Omissions are accounted for in an admirably clearthinking apologia which gives the book its preface,