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materialist — the struggle to put society above the individual, a world confused and exhausted, living on nerves stretched to breaking point, Charlie comes as a release and a solace, paradoxically enough, since he is himself part of the struggle. Long queues have stretched round cinemas, waiting even in the rain to see, not the latest Hollywood stupendous, but a delicate film made twenty years ago, a silent film that went straight to the heart; and goes still to the unchanging heart of the people everywhere.
No other maker of films has been able to cross the frontiers of time as Chaplin has; nor is this his only immortality. He has been received among the hierarchy of clowns, has joined the immortal family of the world of entertainment.
For there have been clowns since man first recognized in himself and his neighbour the impulse to laugh cruelly at deformity. They were already present in the circuses and public spectacles of Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. Through the centuries, their paths crossed those of the Commedia dell 'Arte, harlequinade and pantomime. The savagery of the laughter they had first aroused gave place to affection; what had originally been natural deformity became assumed grotesqueness, until, with the development of the modern circus, came its own family of clowns, of the highest pedigree, if not of unbroken line.
First comes the entree clown, superb in spangles and frill, born and bred in the Big Top; then the auguste, reaching back into the past as far as Augustus Caesar, to a progenitor savage and monstrous, alive with political satire and the crude malice of barbarians, but now a fantastic figure of fun, forever doomed to be too tall or too short, too slow or too quick, prone to stumble, to receive pails of water in the face, to slip over a banana skin, forever to blunder and to fail, and be taken to the warm hearts of children, who, watching him fall flat upon his face as he enters the ring, shout with the welcome given only to the dearest friends "Auguste idiot ! ". To these aristocrats of the circus was added the Joey, based on the tradition, costume and make-up of Joseph Grimaldi, one of the most famous clowns of harlequinade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Now, in our own time, and in his own time, comes the Charlie, so that throughout the world, wherever circuses put up their mushroom growths for a few nights or a few weeks, and the clowns, augustes and Joeys tumble into the ring, each in his specific and traditional costume, there will be found the baggy trousers, huge boots, little bowler, cane, and moustache, of the Charlie.
All circus clowns have their special tradition and technique, in many cases handed down from father to son; and it is interesting to note, in view of its derivation, that the Charlie is a "wonderfully effective