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