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THE COMING OF THE CUSTARD PIE 89
mime which raised him above his fellows. Of the comics of his time he alone deserves to be ranked with Chaplin.
Fields was the son of an English immigrant, and to the very end there was an English sense of intimacy in his performances. He had no mastery of wisecracks. It was the manner of the man, the blustering, boisterous charm of his idiocy, the senile twitch in his face, the resemblance to an over-ripe fruit, which attracted people to him. He was a throwback to Regency times, a shrivelled Beau Brummell with a dew-lap and little taste for shaving, roaring his perpetual complaints against the weather and the interference of people, always accusing the world of malice, though it was clear enough that he contained in his own person enough black bile to drown the world. Where Groucho Marx was purely synthetic, Fields was a natural, and his behavior off the stage was often indistinguishable from his behavior on it, so providing one more proof (if any was needed) that his malice arose from his experience of the world, the conjured enemies who filled his dreams and against whom he waged an unceasing war. There was something devilish in Fields, as there was in Charlie. It is the absence of the devil which makes the modern stage so tame.
When Chaplin came to America the great days of vaudeville were nearly over. He appeared at the old Hammerstein's Theater in New York in A Night at an English Music-Hall, but he was not wildly successful. He went on tour. He was adored in Brooklyn and tolerated in Kansas. He went through the whole Karno repertoire, but his forte was the dude who lolls just below the stage and interrupts the performance with a wild contempt for performers and audience alike, forever scrambling with the musicians in the orchestra pit, the actors, the stage manager, the lady with the boa, smoking continually— he could suggest his massive contempt of the world with a single puff of his cigarette, a wiggle of his finger, and when he marched on the stage the welling