At the outset of the picture Chaplin has a job tightening
nuts on pieces of steel along a fast moving belt. The belt
moves faster and faster and eventually Charlie is driven
crazy and loses his job. This is "absurd ineptitude."
He walks through a great crowd of unemployed men at
the factory gate. This is "timeless and priceless."
When as night watchman in a department store he treats
his former fellow workers, now burglars, to the best
III
the
house, gives them the finest champagne, that is "the purest
the most disinterested comedy."
After he goes crazy and runs amok with the tools still
in his hands he meets a woman who has buttons on her
breasts, buttons just like the nuts on the belt. He wants to
tighten these nuts and he chases the woman. Between this
and Harpo's arbitrary chasing of every blonde in sight,
Mark VanDoren can detect no difference.
At the end Charlie and his girl walk off hand in hand
toward the horizon. I don't see how that invalidates the
picture or robs it of artistic unity, as several of the reviewers
claim. Did Voltaire invalidate
Candide
when he ended by
advising people to cultivate their gardens? Should Swift have
appended a note on dialectical materialism to top off the
Bickerstaff papers?
Candide
was written in
1759,
the Bickerstaff papers in
1708,
and
Modem Times
was produced in
1935.
Of course.
But Chaplin is no more an artist of the proletarian revolu-
tion than Voltaire or Swift. And in view of his background
and development it would appear futile to demand that he
become one. Charmion Von Wiegand, who in
New Theatre
magazine has written the only serious analysis of the picture
to date, regrets that "To the end Charlie remains the same
lonely little
individual. ...
He has learned nothing from his
unfortunate adventures,
experiences from which the most
obdurate and thickheaded individual would conceivably have
gained some knowledge or common sense." She thinks Chap-
lin ought to discard the old Charlie costume and character,
ought definitely to espouse the cause of "the vast majority
of common folk from whom he has always drawn his
strength." In short, he ought to be a revolutionary.
That would not only be fine but miraculous, and I don't
think he will ever make it. Not because he is a pure, disin-
terested, timeless and priceless comedian either. Chaplin has
had his chances to learn about the revolution and there is
no evidence he took much advantage of them. For all that,
we must look at
M adem Times
as something that came out
of Hollywood. That is what makes Chaplin great' and his
picture a tremendous achievement. Chaplin is an individual-
ist, he is a romantic, but not romantic enough to have closed
his eyes to the most fundamental
cruelties of bourgeois
society. To film these things beautifully and bitterly is a
contribution as important as that of Dreiser in literature.
Unfortunately,
this reviewer has misgauged his space again
and there is no room to analyze the remarkable critiques
accorded the picture by the metropolitan press. Let us sl1m-
marize them therefore in the words of Miss Bland Johane-
son of the
Daily Mirror:
"It adheres to the Chaplin tradi-
tion, sweet, sentimental and touching." That day the
111irror
printed another splendid article, an interview with Carole
Lombard.
"Half the leading men today," she said, "either
can't act, look like coal heavers in dinner clothes or make
love like wrestlers. But good actors or not, they should be
virile."
EDWARD NEWHOUSE
26
BOOKS
The Last Platonist
THE LAST PURITAN,
by George Santayana.
Charles
Scribner's Sons. $2.75.
The Last Puritan
is a laboratory of the imagination in
which ideal codes of living, usually distinctly embodied in
the characters,
sometimes criss-crossing, battle for suprem-
acy. Like Pater's
Marius The Epicurean,
it is built of moods
and philosophic discourses; the action remains largely an
accompaniment
to the main theme. But, despite the fact
that
The Last Puritan
has a more recognizable pattern of
events, it is a more intangible work than
Marius The Epi-
curean.
Pater was stating a creed- a kind of orderly, Vic-
torian Epicureanism:
Santayana is destroying a creed, Puri-
tanism, through a history of its effects on Oliver Alden, the
central character,
and through a counter-creed which is a
vague mixture of Paganism, Platonism, and a very civilized
animal freedom. This release from Puritanism into another
form of living is as devoid of practical meaning as purifica-
tion by fire, since Santayana finds the alternative to Puritan-
ism in the green fields, in the sunlight of past culture, in
the animal instincts, in the creative imagination.
All fine
things,-but
how are they to be integrated into any given
form of living?
Without some knowledge of Santayana's philosophy,
The
Last Puritan
would be a very baffling book. It is not so
much a fulfillment of his ideas as an illustration of them in
the lives of his chosen characters.
It would have been im-
possible for Santayana to sink his philosophy into the cur-
rents of modern life because it is basically so detached from
the world about us. For years Santayana has been inhabiting
a hermitage of the mind. A sensitive, erudite, imaginative
man, he has been constructing a modern version of Platon-
ism, preserving its pagan will to !lve and to know, its
Christian sense of order, and its Greek assumption of gentle-
manly leisure, and reworking its metaphysic to introduce a
more naturalistic view of the world. Plato's ideal essences
of which events in this world are merely a copy become for
Santayana the essential qualities of things which men con-
tinually discover. Santayana clears away what for him are
the errors, the superstitions,
the dogmas of the past by an
astringent
skepticism,
and then he builds his doctrine of
essence on "animal faith", which is a natural,
animal ac-
ceptance of things and events. In its non-technical aspects
Santayana's philosophy can be seen as the intelligent,
semi-
poetic speculations of a cloistered thinker, sailing the high
seas of past thought, never mooring at some junction of con-
temporary conHict. Strip the cloak of timelessness which
musty academicians have draped around philosophers,
and
they stand out as exponents of some leading ideas of their
time. Santayana, on the other hand, has been roaming through
side-paths. I offer these remarks, of course, not as a philo-
sophic criticism of Santayana's position, but as a comment on
his essential romanticism, his detachment from the noise and
bustle of contemporary ideas.
As Santayana explains, Oliver Alden is the last Puritan,
not because there will be no others after him, but because
the forces of Puritanism work themselves out to their logical
end in him. In this sense Oliver is a test tube in which
Puritanism is born and nurtured,
becomes infected with a
APRIL,
193
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