MISCELLANEOUS
Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—Mrs Pankhurst—Jacob
Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté
Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer
who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this
most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that
extraordinary breath-catching passage in _Villette_ where Charlotte
Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who
went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think,
was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and
her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the
footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights,
and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a
veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If
you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women
can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And
who was it who wrote the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_? And even, after
all, Aphra Behn ... well, _she_ knew something about women, didn’t she?
So that I feel only a woman can write at all convincingly of Yvette
Guilbert. I must just gossip and prattle a little while.
I must have heard Yvette Guilbert a score of times. The first occasion
was in the Midland Hall, Manchester, eight or ten years ago, when
she sang to an audience of about two hundred frigid people who,
apparently, knew as much French as I know of the language of the Serbs,
and as much about Art as the pencil with which I write knows about the
thoughts it records. Ernest Newman was there and, that night, wrote
an article for _The Manchester Guardian_ that must have more than
compensated Guilbert for the smallness of the audience. For she loves
praise, even the praise she gives herself, as the following letter
addressed to myself will testify:
Je reçois votre aimable lettre et votre _admirable article_!! Je
ne peux pas vous dire toute _la joie_ que je ressens en lisant
que vous comprenez _si bien_ mes efforts! Je n’ai jamais _su être
hypocrite_ et j’ai toujours manqué de diplomatie dans la vie à
cause de cela; aussi, je n’hésite pas à vous dire que je _crois_
sincèrement mériter vos bonnes paroles parce que je passe _ma
vie entière_ à _me dévouer_ à mon art sans jamais de vacances.
Mon amour pour le travail et la Beauté et tout ce qui est _pure_
en art est tout le “mateur” de mes forces intellectuelles. Merci
d’avoir deviné ce que le public ne voit pas toujours. Mes mains
dans les vôtres.
Yvette Guilbert.
Guilbert has no singing voice, and yet she sings. Her singing voice
is small ... ever so small. Yet clear, distinct, expressive and, in
the lowest register, most deep and thrilling. How little mere “voice”
matters! Only consider. Here, on one hand, we have Madame Clara Butt
with, I suppose, one of the most wonderful organs that this world,
or any other world, has ever listened to. But would you walk five
miles to hear her sing? I wouldn’t. You, I hope and believe, wouldn’t
either. Would you walk five miles to hear Blanche Marchesi sing—Blanche
Marchesi, whose voice, as mere voice, is like a hundred other voices?
Of course you would. Voice matters little. It is the temperament, the
intellect, behind the voice that counts. And the eternal struggle
that Yvette Guilbert has had to undergo has been the struggle to make
her comparatively small voice express the wonderful things of her
imagination.
A gesture. A look. An inflection. Two paces on the platform. A little
cry ... a little cry of dismay. A superb and beautiful signal that
tells us the Mother of God is big with a Child. A tiny silence. A
moment of jauntiness. Something arch and irresistible. Something tragic
that makes you clench your fists....
One day Yvette Guilbert wrote to ask me to call on her. I did not go.
One feels so foolish in the presence of genius. One’s vanity is hurt.
One is afraid of being found out.
* * * * *
In the early days of the war I visited Sir Victor Horsley several times
at his home. I was interested in shell shock, in the influence that
the horror of war has on certain types of human nature, and he was
good enough to supply me with a great deal of information. Quiet and
undemonstrative, he used always to stand, or move slowly up and down
the room; in the long talks we had together, I do not remember his
sitting down once.
I don’t think I ever met a man more careful to express his exact
meaning; he appeared to have a horror of exaggeration and he qualified
nearly every statement he made. In discussing scientific subjects such
scrupulous carefulness is, of course, not only wise but necessary, and
when, later on, I wrote a newspaper article on the effect that the
strain and horror of war have on the human brain, Sir Victor showed
himself very anxious that, in quoting his views, I should do so in
language that could not possibly be interpreted in two different senses.
He told me what my own experience in France and Salonica in 1915–1917
confirmed later on, that it is frequently the neurotic, the artistic,
the excitable man who most quickly adapts himself to, and is least
disturbed by, the incredible cruelties of warfare, whilst the
phlegmatic type of man is more liable to be broken by those cruelties.
Sir Victor Horsley suggested that this was, in some measure, due to
the fact that the neurotic man has, in imagination, tasted the terror
of war before he has actually experienced it; that he has, as it were,
prepared his mind for the shock it is to receive. The unimaginative man
cannot do this, so that when his turn comes to go to the trenches and
witness stark horrors, his nervous system reacts most violently.
Sir Victor spoke a good deal to me about the evil influence of drink,
and continually regretted that rum was served out to our soldiers. On
this subject, of course, though I disagreed with him profoundly, I did
not attempt to argue, though I pointed out that Napoleon had won many
of his campaigns by almost drugging his men with spirits. To this he
made no reply, though he shook his head gravely and seemed to ponder
a little.
My last interview with him was in his long, bare dining-room, where, as
we stood before the fire, he described to me in a low, serious voice
two or three war cases of mental trouble (functional, of course, not
organic), and I could see that the war was, so to speak, closing in
around him and enveloping him with its violent appeals, its tragic
interests.
* * * * *
Mrs Pankhurst I met only once, but the impression she has left on my
mind is that of a most vivid personality. I saw her in many ridiculous
situations that would have made almost any other person look positively
foolish; but Mrs Pankhurst’s sense of personal dignity is so strong,
her personality is so imperious, and, above all, she possesses so much
humour and good sense, that it is impossible to imagine any situation,
however grotesque, that would render her ridiculous.
My interview with her was at the close of a day during which she had
worked incessantly. She was tired, and her face was lined and rather
dim. An hour earlier I had seen her in Oxford Street, Manchester,
seated in an open, horseless carriage, a dozen enthusiastic girls
pulling at the shafts, a few ribald boys following and shouting small
obscenities. I admired the perfect way she carried off the trying
situation. She sat perfectly calmly, as though nothing in the least
unusual were happening, as though, indeed, it were her daily custom,
and the daily custom of all women, to be dragged through the public
streets by a band of young ladies.
We sat under a lamp at a large table. The things we discussed are now
of no consequence, for the need for their discussion no longer exists.
I can only give my impression of her.
She struck me as being unutterably weary, weary bodily and perhaps
mentally. Her personality suggested a body and a spirit being driven
by an implacable will, a will that had no mercy for herself or for
others, a will that no power could break. I could not help wondering,
as I looked at her, whether she had not her moments of doubt, of
self-distrust. She must have had, for all men and women have. But those
moments would be few and short. Though she spoke to me very quietly,
without a gesture, with one rather tightly clenched hand on the table,
I felt the sheer _power_ of her, the power that a quenchless spirit
always gives to its owner.
Fanatic? Well, yes, if to be indifferent to the opinion of other people
and to be absolutely sure of yourself is to be fanatical. Certainly,
she was strange and grim and relentless. And yet one could not doubt
her tenderness, her deep sympathy, her devotion to humanity. Yes, a
strange woman, but perhaps not so very strange. The qualities I saw in
her are common qualities; the difference between her and others was
simply that she possessed those qualities in an unusual degree.
* * * * *
Jacob Epstein, after flouting the artistic conventions for at least ten
years, is being taken to the heart of the public. The impossible is
happening, and it is happening because of the war. The war has forced
reality upon us; it has made us love beauty rather than prettiness,
truth rather than make-believe, the soul of things rather than their
appearances.
Epstein, I think, could never be said to be in revolt against any of
the artistic tendencies of the time. He simply did not follow those
tendencies or permit them to influence him. But three or four years
ago, when I first met him, he had the appearance, the manner, and even
the thoughts of one who is in revolt.
I remember discussing with him some very curious and, indeed, rather
alarming designs of his which were being exhibited at a little gallery
whose name I have forgotten. The designs were openly and widely
described as “indecent”; to me they were not indecent: they were merely
meaningless. I could see no idea behind them.
“They are not designs,” said Epstein, a little petulantly, I thought.
“Then what _are_ they?” I asked. “What do _you_ call them?”
“I am not aware that I call them anything.”
“But what do they _mean_?”
He smiled curiously and (we were sitting in the Café Royal) lit a
cigarette.
“Ah! That is for you to find out. Surely you don’t expect an artist to
explain himself?”
Of course he was perfectly right, and I was more than foolish to ask
him these questions. But I flogged at it.
“Now, your busts! Especially that wonderful head of Augustus John’s
son!—beautiful, marvellous! But those extraordinary red drawings.”
“I cannot explain them,” said he, “but I would certainly like you to
understand them, for it seems to me that you are not unintelligent.”
He gave me a quick, sly look, and we began to talk of John. I am afraid
that Epstein must have qualified his opinion of my intelligence, for
he asserted, in contradiction to what I was saying, that John was on
the wrong tack, and we failed to come to any agreement about this most
wonderful of living painters.
Like most artists, Epstein is pronouncedly inarticulate. He is, I
suppose, as much a mystery to himself as he is to others. But his work
is, of course, a hundred times more interesting than himself.
I used to see him often, but we rarely did more than acknowledge
each other’s existence, and when I saw him the other week in khaki,
sitting in the Café Royal, it was clear to me that, though he said he
remembered me, he had only a vague recollection of my personality and
had completely forgotten my name.
* * * * *
I have often thought it strange that while singers like Madame Patti
and Madame Tetrazzini should conquer the world—and by the world I
mean every section of the musical public, vulgar and fastidious
alike—another and, to my mind, a very much finer artiste, Madame Ackté,
should be regarded with delight only by those whose musical experience
is wide and whose minds have been tutored by comprehensive study.
Personality, after all, is almost everything in Art, and Madame Ackté
has a personality that dwarfs into insignificance nearly all singers
who are her equal in technical attainments and in musical subtlety.
Her great part is Salomé, in Richard Strauss’s opera of that name. With
the wonderful intuition of a healthy, robust mind she has divined all
the perverted wickedness of that most tortured woman. Her acting is
among the finest things of our day.
No one could guess, in talking to this quiet, almost demure woman,
that she has in her such fires of passion, such powers of portraying
devastating wickedness. She has charm, graciousness, simplicity. Like
Yvette Guilbert, she has worked hard almost every day of her life. Her
talk is all of music and acting. She seems most unmodern. Her ingenuous
love of praise is delightful, and if you notice the little subtleties
in her singing and acting that most people do not notice, she is your
friend for ever.