II

The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every one else on the music-hall stage is precisely the difference between Sarah Bernhardt and every one else on the stage of legitimate drama.  Elsewhere you may find many admirable qualities, many brilliant accomplishments, but nowhere else that revelation of an extraordinarily interesting personality through the medium of an extraordinarily finished art.  Yvette Guilbert has something new to say, and she has discovered a new way of saying it.  She has had precursors, but she has eclipsed them.  She sings, for instance, songs of Aristide Bruant, songs which he had sung before her, and sung admirably, in his brutal and elaborately careless way.  But she has found meanings in them which Bruant, who wrote them, never discovered, or, certainly, could never interpret; she has surpassed him in his own quality, the macabre; she has transformed the rough material, which had seemed adequately handled until she showed how much more could be done with it, into something artistically fine and distinguished.  And just as, in the brutal and macabre style, she has done what Bruant was only trying to do, so, in the style, supposed to be traditionally French, of delicate insinuation, she has invented new shades of expression, she has discovered a whole new method of suggestion.  And it is here, perhaps, that the new material which she has known, by some happy instinct, how to lay her hands on, has been of most service to her.  She sings, a little cruelly, of the young girl; and the young girl of her songs (that demoiselle de pensionnat who is the heroine of one of the most famous of them) is a very different being from the fair abstraction, even rosier and vaguer to the French mind than it is to the English, which stands for the ideal of girlhood.  It is, rather, the young girl as Goncourt has rendered her in “Cherie,” a creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at work somewhat abnormally in an anaemic frame, with an intelligence left to feed mainly on itself.  And Yvette herself, with her bright hair, the sleepy gold fire of her eyes, her slimness, her gracious awkwardness, her air of delusive innocence, is the very type of the young girl of whom she sings.  There is a certain malice in it all, a malicious insistence on the other side of innocence.  But there it is, a new figure; and but one among the creations which we owe to this “comic singer,” whose comedy is, for the most part, so serious and so tragic.

For the art of Yvette Guilbert is of that essentially modern kind which, even in a subject supposed to be comic, a subject we are accustomed to see dealt with, if dealt with at all, in burlesque, seeks mainly for the reality of things (and reality, if we get deep enough into it, is never comic), and endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant expression for that.  It is an art concerned, for the most part,