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78 THE GREAT GOD PAN
farcical extravagances were employed to soften the bitterness of truth. It is a nice phrase, but Dickens was rarely concerned to soften bitterness of any kind, and it is more likely that his facetiousness arose when he stepped beyond caricature into farce. Farce hovers over his novels, never far removed though rarely present in the substance of the novels themselves. It is the same with Chaplin. The slightest twist of the micrometer, the slightest faltering of focus, and all the films would evaporate into farce, so close are high tragedy and high comedy to the farcical.
Chaplin's childhood in Lambeth was farce, tragedy, comedy and utter boredom. Born in Fontainebleau near Paris, he was less than a year old when he was brought to live in Chester Street which runs between Kennington Road and Lower Kennington Lane. L ntil he went on tour the shabby sidestreets of Kennington were his home. His mother was half-French, there was some Spanish blood in her, and there may have been gypsy blood as well. Her grandfather was a French general who may have fought under Xapoleon. His father, a cobbler's son, was a baritone and a 'cellist, and well-known in the music-halls. A photograph reproduced on the music-sheets of a song he popularised shows him to have had a debonair expression, his hair thick and curly, his eyes very large and his lips rather feminine, but the whole face suggests a carefree extravert and a man of the world. He was about twenty-five when he married his half-French wife in 1888. In the early morning of April 16 in the following year, the first and only son of the marriage was born. Three months before his birth an obscure photographer called Friese Greene had taken at the corner of Hyde Park the first moving pictures ever made.
The early years of the marriage were hard torture for the young parents, both of whom had children from previous marriages to support. They went on tour, but music-halls provided them with a bare living, and they were often in debt. They were gifted performers, and if they had found a