It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly, deliciously, gay.  There is one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles, and trills a rapid flurry of broken words and phrases, with the sudden, spontaneous, irresponsible mirth of a bird.  But where she is most herself is in a manner of tragic comedy which has never been seen on the music-hall stage from the beginning.  It is the profoundly sad and essentially serious comedy which one sees in Forain’s drawings, those rapid outlines which, with the turn of a pencil, give you the whole existence of those base sections of society which our art in England is mainly forced to ignore.  People call the art of Forain immoral, they call Yvette Guilbert’s songs immoral.  That is merely the conventional misuse of a conventional word.  The art of Yvette Guilbert is certainly the art of realism.  She brings before you the real life-drama of the streets, of the pot-house; she shows you the seamy side of life behind the scenes; she calls things by their right names.  But there is not a touch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated nor contaminating by what she sings; she is simply a great, impersonal, dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it.

Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an inflection of the voice, a bend of that curious long thin body which seems to be embodied gesture, she can suggest, she can portray, the humour that is dry, ironical, coarse (I will admit), unctuous even.  Her voice can be sweet or harsh; it can chirp, lilt, chuckle, stutter; it can moan or laugh, be tipsy or distinguished.  Nowhere is she conventional; nowhere does she resemble any other French singer.  Voice, face, gestures, pantomime, all are different, all are purely her own.  She is a creature of contrasts, and suggests at once all that is innocent and all that is perverse.  She has the pure blue eyes of a child, eyes that are cloudless, that gleam with a wicked ingenuousness, that close in the utter abasement of weariness, that open wide in all the expressionlessness of surprise.  Her naivete is perfect, and perfect, too, is that strange, subtle smile of comprehension that closes the period.  A great impersonal artist, depending as she does entirely on her expressive power, her dramatic capabilities, her gift for being moved, for rendering the emotions of those in whom we do not look for just that kind of emotion, she affects one all the time as being, after all, removed from what she sings of; an artist whose sympathy is an instinct, a divination.  There is something automatic in all fine histrionic genius, and I find some of the charm of the automaton in Yvette Guilbert.  The real woman, one fancies, is the slim bright-haired girl who looks so pleased and so amused when you applaud her, and whom it pleases to please you, just because it is amusing.  She could not tell you how she happens to be a great artist; how she has found a voice for the tragic comedy of cities; how it is that she makes you cry when she sings of sordid miseries.  “That is her secret,” we are accustomed to say; and I like to imagine that it is a secret which she herself has never fathomed.