I
She is tall, thin, a little angular, most winningly and girlishly
awkward, as she wanders on to the stage with an air of vague
distraction. Her shoulders droop, her arms hang limply. She doubles
forward in an automatic bow in response to the thunders of applause, and
that curious smile breaks out along her lips and rises and dances in her
bright light-blue eyes, wide open in a sort of child-like astonishment.
Her hair, a bright auburn, rises in soft masses above a large, pure
forehead. She wears a trailing dress, striped yellow and pink, without
ornament. Her arms are covered with long black gloves. The applause
stops suddenly; there is a hush of suspense; she is beginning to sing.
And with the first note you realise the difference between Yvette
Guilbert and all the rest of the world. A sonnet by Mr. André
Raffalovich states just that difference so subtly that I must quote it
to help out my interpretation:
If you want hearty laughter, country mirth--
Or frantic gestures of an acrobat,
Heels over head--or floating lace skirts worth
I know not what, a large eccentric hat
And diamonds, the gift of some dull boy--
Then when you see her do not wrong Yvette,
Because Yvette is not a clever toy,
A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set ...
And should her song sound cynical and base
At first, herself ungainly, or her smile
Monotonous--wait, listen, watch her face:
The sufferings of those the world calls vile
She sings, and as you watch Yvette Guilbert,
You too will shiver, seeing their despair.
Now to me Yvette Guilbert was exquisite from the first moment.
"Exquisite!" I said under my breath, as I first saw her come upon the
stage. But it is not merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.
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
naïveté 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.