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APPENDIX B
t©k Some Writings of Charles Chaplin
1. CHAPLIN ON THE SYMBOLISM OF HIS COSTUME.
His little moustache? That is a symbol of vanity. His skimpy coat, his trousers so ridiculously baggy and shapeless? They are the caricature of our eccentricity, our stupidities, our clumsiness. ( This is obviously the reflective working out of an earlier subconscious inspiration, but the idea that the costume itself was a satire on\ humanity was probably with him from the beginning. So too the importance of the world-famous cane.) The idea of the walkingstick was perhaps my happiest inspiration, for the cane was what made me speedily known. Moreover, I developed business with it to such a point that it took on a comic character of its own. Often, I found it hooked round someone's leg, or catching him by the shoulder, and in these ways I got a laugh from the public while I was myself scarcely aware of the gesture. I don't think I had fully understood in the beginning how much, among millions of individuals, a walking stick puts a label marked 'dandy' on a man. So that when I waddled on to the stage with my little walking stick and a serious air, I gave the impression of an attempt at dignity, which was exactly my aim.
2. FROM MY WONDERFUL VISIT (1922).
A description of the old blind man who was a familiar figure of his childhood, standing always under the bridge of Westminster Road: —
There he is, the same old figure, the same old blind man I used to see as a child of five, with the same old earmuffs, with his back against the wall and the same stream of greasy water trickling down the stone behind his back. The same old clothes, a bit greener with age, and the irregular bush of whiskers, coloured almost in a rainbow array, but with a dirty grey predominant. He has that same stark look in his eyes that used to make me sick as a child. Everything exactly the same, only a bit more dilapidated. ... To me it is all too horrible. He is the personification of poverty at its worst, sunk in that inertia that comes of lost hope. It is too terrible.
The Children of Lambeth
As I pass, they look up. Frankly and without embarrassment, they look at the stranger with their beautiful kindly eyes. They smile at