"The Gold Rush"

(3 of 3)

So violently did the vulgar clasp him to its unclean bosom that the cultured upper classes reacted to any mention of his name as they would to a bathroom joke—they saw the point, but would not be caught laughing at it. This son of moonlight and custard pie crust was a green pea off the knives of the intelligentsia until statements of his began to appear in the public press to the effect that "Solitude is my only relief. ... I live with abstract thinkers, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Walter Pater. . . . Human contact makes me ill. ... I resolve to retire to some Italian lake with my beloved Shelley, Keats, and violin. ... I am too tragic by nature. ... I don't give a damn about anybody. ..." Critics took him up. On the strength of his avowed penchant for philosophical thought, they decided that he was a genius. H. G. Wells was proud to meet him. George Bernard Shaw gave him a couple of hundred well-chosen words. Meanwhile, Genius Chaplin continued to put one foot in front of the other much as before. He sat down in eggs. He held babies in his lap. His salary became $1,000,000 a year.

The complicated misanthropy which enabled him, his interpreters declared, to love the public and spurn humanity, did not preclude certain trifling investigation of the tenderer emotions. One such investigation—attempted in 1918 with Mildred Harris—ended in a divorce. She charged that he starved her, got drunk, hit hard. To down the scurrile rumor that he had been seared by the red-hot lips of Actress Pola Negri, he last year married (in Mexico) his leading lady, Lita Grey, aged 16.

In these slight ruffles he retained both his composure and his reticence. Grave, deliberate, costly, he has gone on utilizing the genius with which few who deify him as a thinker, apotheosize him as a tragedian, credit him the genius for being funny.