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.




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