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Everything in that room breathes of restfulness and quiet. The tranquil soul seeks its inspiration in sunlight and gay colours. Chaplin's restless spirit, with its vivid enthusiasms, its eternally unappeased ideals, turns to soft grey twilights and the intimate companionship of books and music.
A man's library is the revelation of his inmost self. Chaplin relies very largely in his comedies on the element of surprise in 'putting across' a big laugh. It will possibly be something of a shock, however, to the more frivolous of his admirers to learn that the following works apparently go to the making of a great comedy artist; at any rate, I found them on his office table:
1. More's Utopia
2. Paine's Political Economy
3. The Tragedies of William Shakespeare
4. The Bomb by Frank Harris, with the author's dedication.
The only works on his bookshelf suggestive of any spirit approaching levity are Denry the Audacious, with the personal inscription of Arnold Bennett, and Irvin Cobb's Speaking of Operations.
Chaplin is entirely a self-educated man, and two bookcases containing the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and a well-thumbed edition of the American Book of Knowledge, show how eagerly and untiringly he has pursued his eternal quest of beauty and truth.
You will notice on a table near the window his violin case with his old David Mantegna, the companion of many an hour when inspiration lies dormant and is lured into being with the sweet strains of Dvorak's Humoresque or Tschaikowsky's Chanson Triste. Individual in all things, Chaplin is a left-handed player and strings his violin from E to G. He likes to play with muted strings; he thinks it sounds 'less harsh' . . . .
On a stand in one corner of the room there are the huge piled up volumes of newspaper cuttings. Chaplin himself rarely reads a press notice, and I think the only one of those volumes that he would ever miss is the one which contains the 'notices' of his early successes on the vaudeville stage. On the occasion of my first visit to the studio, he unearthed it after some trouble, handling it with something like real affection. It is still preserved in the old binding with its gaudy reds and golds, the sort of album in which, as kiddies, we all used to stick scraps and transfers on a wet Saturday afternoon. It contains some highly interesting records of genius in the adolescent stage, and one can imagine with what pride the fifteen-year-old boy pasted into his precious book that first glowing notice of Sherlock Holmes, in which 'one of the brightest bits of acting in the play was given by Mr. Charles Chaplin who, as Billy, Holmes' page boy, displayed immense activity as well as dramatic appreciation.'
In an alcove overlooking the studio grounds is Charlie's modest dressing-room. There is a little white table with a mirror and every accessory just in its proper place, though it must be owned that the general scheme looks somewhat different of an evening when Mr. Chaplin has finished the day's work.
With its quiet subdued colour scheme, its books and its pictures, Charlie's sanctum conveys as little of the general atmosphere of a movie comedy as the Chaplin of private life. . . ."(17).
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