.Film Chronicle
MONSIEUR VERDOU,X
C
HAPLIN's TRAMP, taken in his most direct significance, represented
the good-hearted and personally cultivated individual in a heartless
and vulgar society. The society was concerned only with the pursuit of
profit, and often not even with that so much as with the mere preserva–
tion of the ugly and impersonal machinery by which the profit was gained;
the Tramp was concerned with the practice of personal relations and
the social graces. Most of all the Tramp was like an aristocrat fallen
on hard times, for what he attempted in all his behavior was to maintain
certain standards of refinement and humanity, to keep life dignified and
make it emotionally and aesthetically satisfying.
The relationship between the Tramp and his society never solidi–
fied. Sometimes the Tramp was able to make use of the society for his
own peculiar ends. Sometimes the society in its mysterious processes
seized upon the Tramp and endowed him with wealth and honor. The
constant difficulties between the two never developed to the point where
the Tramp could begin to think of himself as opposed to the society;
indeed, it was essential to his character that he should take the society
as given and make his own life on its margin. And the society, for its
part, had nothing against the Tramp; even when it knocked him down,
it did so not because he was a threat-the society was too impersonal
even to conceive of such a possibility-but simply because his behavior
was preposterous; the blow was always delivered in a fit of abstraction,
so to speak, without serious intent. The satiric point of the relationship
lay precisely in this element of fortuitousness and innocence: it
happened
that the Tramp and the society were in constant collision, but neither
side was impelled to draw any conclusions from this. The absurdity of
the Tramp's behavior consisted in its irrelevance to the preoccupations
of the society; the viciousness of the society consisted in its failure to
make any provision for the Tramp, in its complete indifference to his
fate.
After 1933, it became increasingly more difficult to maintain such
a picture of the relationship between the individual and his society.
Now the two were compelled to become conscious of each other, openly
and continuously, and the quality of innocence--even if it had been only
an apparent innocence-could no longer
be
preserved between them;
