A circular was issued by the American Society for Psychical Research, a group founded in 1885 in Boston by curious men, including, as they never failed to mention, William James, dean of skeptical inquiry and father of America psychology. After his death, it had become much more satisfying for the remaining founders to believe than to evaluate, and currently the Society was tilting toward defense of the ethereal world. The circular on Chaplin was written by a Professor Bamfylde Moore Carew (“the Bohemian rhapsodist,” as he was known).

Charlie Chaplin, Professor Carew wrote,

has become an American obsession, and among young and active minds, Chaplin is a subject of constantly recurrent thought. We find beyond peradventure that on Nov. 12 there existed a Chaplin impulse, which extended the length and breadth of the continent.

After several expository paragraphs (including a rhetorical blackjack taken to the knees of his enemies in physics, psychology, and Scientific American), Carew concluded:

There is a new medium which we do not yet understand the psychology behind, the filmed photoplay. For the first time, our “hero” has fame not predicated on his presence before us, but upon a technology that renders him both real and imaginary. Not since the days of the prophets have we all so swiftly agreed that a single entity, one suffering many of life’s mishaps, can answer so many of our needs. We needed Charlie Chaplin to be our alter ego—or perhaps simply our ego itself—and so he came to us. Psychologists, those alarmists, call it mass hysteria. I call it a shared dream, a fairy tale, the birth of a myth. Today is a new beginning.

There Professor Carew’s argument finished, never to be examined or expanded. He did not indicate what exactly was beginning. No one seems to have inquired. Instead, the moment was over, and the world and all its inhabitants could move on.

Unless, of course, you happened to be one particular person.

4

His start was rocky. In his first films, age twenty-four, 1914, Keystone Studios, he ambles into shots as if thrown from the wings and unsure where his audience is hiding. His gaze is distant and calculating, that of a boxer sizing up opponents whose looming shadows no one can quite see.