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
naivete 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 whos