e 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
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 i