Nearly everyone who has cared about Chaplin's art has been convinced that in The Tramp or The Little Fellow, to use the terms invariably employed in discussing Chaplin's great creation, we had a very direct expression of the artist's personality—"so simple and unaffected" despite the onslaught of previously unimagined celebrity. Certainly Chaplin has wanted us to believe that…. Surely what is best and wisest in him can be found in The Tramp. (p. 13)

There are lots of ways to put it; he found poetry in the ordinary, he transcended reality, he extended the range of pantomime to previously unimagined dimensions. Yet none of them quite explain his phenomenal appeal. Chaplin has never been generous in acknowledging influences, but some critics have noticed a correlation between his work and that of Max Linder, who had earlier brought something of the European comic tradition to the screen through his Pathé shorts. Edmund Wilson has emphasized how much Chaplin owed to the classic turns of the English music halls. And despite his protests it is clear that Chaplin learned a great deal from Sennett, especially about pacing and the use of the chase as a climax.

In short, he summarized much that had gone before, linking the art of screen comedy to a much older tradition. This was very significant to those intellectuals who began to take the movies seriously in the teens and twenties of this century…. Through all the long years when most of them were exercising their contempt for movies in general, Chaplin was always cited as the medium's one unquestioned, unquestionable artist, the individualist amid the corporate herd, a man clinging to his peculiar vision while everyone else went hooting off in pursuit of momentary fads….

Yet this fact remains: Chaplin never again achieved the perfection of those first years. The little films of The Little Fellow were, in effect, solo ballets. As such, they had no more need of plot, of subsidiary characterizations, of great themes than one of Nijinsky's variations did. Despite the reams of appreciative analysis written about the early films, the pleasure we derived from them was essentially kinesthetic and therefore non- (and even perhaps anti-) intellectual. One could go on watching them for a lifetime. Indeed, one has.

But popular arts like the movies are cruel in their demand for novelty. And so are the intellectuals who have taken such arts for their province. No matter what they thought they thought, there was in their endless nattering over Chaplin an implicit demand for "development," for big ideas and statements. No doubt Chaplin made the same demands on himself. Beginning with "The Kid" in 1920 he began to inject larger and larger doses of pure sentiment into his work. No less than Griffith's, his was essentially a Victorian sensibility and he turned naturally to a rather cloying sweetness when he was forced, by the public demand for feature-length films, to extend his works.

There were other problems as well. As Edmund Wilson accurately noticed in 1925, "His gift is primarily the actor's, not the director's or the artist's. All the photographic, the plastic development of the movies, which is at present making such remarkable advances, seems not to interest Chaplin. His pictures are still in this respect nearly as raw as "Tilly's Punctured Romance" or any other primitive comedy." He added, presciently, that Chaplin "is jealous of his independence … he is very unlikely to allow himself to be written for, directed or even advised." (p. 47)

The coming of sound, naturally, was a threatening problem, solved in "City Lights" and "Modern Times" by the simple expedient of ignoring the microphone and filling the track with music, sound effects, and an occasional burst of gibberish. But dramatic as Chaplin's confrontation was with a technological advance he disliked, and exciting as his triumph over it was (no other screen artist dared so radical a strategy), I do not think it was fear of movies that talked which stayed Chaplin's hand….

[Every] stylistic and technical change which has come to the movies since the end of World War I has implicitly interfered with his (and our) contemplation of his screen self. Length, of course, implies the necessity for sub-plots and the presence of other actors in significant roles. Very distracting. The growth in movie "plasticity" that Wilson spoke of was similarly likely to disrupt our concentration on the nuances of his art. And, of course, talk was perceived to be fatally interruptive. (p. 48)

[There is something disturbing] in the late films. For what we see surfacing in them is something that we may well have been aware of right from the start, yet dismissed as unworthy of us.

That, of course, is the increasingly shrill egoism of the artist, a quality transcending mere self-consciousness, and preventing those of us who were not part of the first, uncomplicated love affair between Chaplin and the public from surrendering to his insistent demand for a continuance of that affair in the old simple terms. (p. 49)