Wyndham Lewis on Chaplin (1915)

I started reading Tarr and found this in the 1915 preface:

In these onslaughts on Humour I am not suggesting that anybody should
laugh less over his beer or wine or forgo the consolation of the
ridiculous. There are circumstances when it is a blessing. But the
worship of the ridiculous is the thing we should be forgone. The
worship (or craze, we call it) of Charlie Chaplin is a mad substitution
of a chaotic tickling for all the other more organically important
ticklings of life.

Nor do I mean here that you or I, if we are above suspicion in the
matter of those other fundamentals, should not allow ourselves the
little scurvy totem of Charlie on the mantelpiece. It is not a
grinning face we object to but a face that is mean when it is serious
and that takes to its grin as a duck takes to water. We must stop
grinning.