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 "Chérie," a
creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at work
somewhat abnormally in an anæmic 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, with all that part
of life which the conventions were intended to hide from us. We see a
world where people are very vicious and very unhappy; a sordid,
miserable world which it is as well sometimes to consider. It is a side
of existence which exists; and to see it is not to be attracted towards
it. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vanné"; it is,
for the most part, weary of itself, without rest, and without escape.
This is Yvette Guilbert's domain; she sings it, as no one has ever sung
it before, with a tragic realism, touched with a sort of grotesque
irony, which is a new thing on any stage. The _rouleuse_ of the Quartier
Bréda, praying to the one saint in her calendar, "Sainte Galette"; the
_soûlarde_, whom the urchins follow and throw stones at in the street;
the whole life of the slums and the gutter: these are her subjects, and
she brings them, by some marvellous fineness of treatment, into the
sphere of art.
It is all a question of _métier_, no doubt, though how far her method is
conscious and deliberate it is difficult to say. But she has certain
quite obvious qualities, of reticence, of moderation, of suspended
emphasis, which can scarcely be other than conscious and deliberate. She
uses but few gestures, and these brief, staccato, and for an immediate
purpose; her hands, in their long black gloves, are almost motionless,
the arms hang limply; and yet every line of the face and body seems
alive, alive and repressed. Her voice can be harsh or sweet, as she
would have it, can laugh or cry, be menacing or caressing; it is never
used for its own sake, decoratively, but for a purpose, for an effect.
And how every word tells! Every word comes to you clearly, carrying
exactly its meaning; and, somehow, along with the words, an emotion,
which you may resolve to ignore, but which will seize upon you, which
will go through and through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, the
power to make you feel intensely; and that is precisely the final test
of a great dramatic artist.