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certain ruefulness in the confession. For Chaplin's emotionalism caused him and others much suffering, and set him off on a long search for the ideal woman with an impetuosity that carried him along faster than he could easily travel. His own temperament made him particularly vulnerable to the beauty of women, with the subsequent disillusionment when he found nothing behind the beauty. Chaplin's odyssey of love has, on the whole, contained more suffering than satisfaction.
That extension of his personal solitude, which covers his isolated position in modern American society, the society against which his heaviest guns have been fired in all his films, is understandable.
Always subjective in his thinking, his own passionate desire for freedom puts him always on the side of the under-dog, the downtrodden, the industrial slave; and therefore against the molochs of big business who have robbed mankind of freedom.
His ardour, his vitality, made a crusader of him. His deep sadness, his solitude, were the basis of his desire that all men should have their minimum requirements. It is the basis too of his appeal to humanity as a whole, without frontiers or nations or any limitation of the brotherhood of man. His individuality and his integrity forced him to declare himself on what is, in America, the wrong side — the side of the little man.
Chaplin is a natural anarchist, an individual unit taking a stand on matters of social and political interest according to his own judgment, principles and understanding, regardless of the established order of the society in which he lives. Sometimes he may find himself in line; more often, not, since his own motives, by which he lives, are in almost total opposition to those ruling the society of our times. That is the core of Chaplin's so-called "political" position. Certainly Soviet Russia has extended welcoming arms to him; and his public activities and statements have given rise to an American witch hunt against him for "subversitive" tendencies.
A natural anarchist cannot be a communist; the ideologies are at opposite poles, since anarchy gives pride of place to the individual, and communism to the state. Chaplin's natural anarchy leads him to an outlook upon life that is communist in the real, not the party political meaning, of the terms — a desire for the brotherhood of man and for an equal distribution of the world's goods, to secure for each man his basic rights. Being what he is, he finds himself in substantial agreement with the ideals of the social programme of the communist party in Russia; but remote indeed from its practice. He is too much of an individualist, too great an artist, to be able to accept the doctrines of State Socialism.