Yvette Guilbert

Impressions of the Famous Diseuse in the Days of the Café Chantant

ARTHUR SYMONS

(Editor's Note: This article is a reminiscence by the English poet of the early days of the great diseuse, when she was a fresh discovery of the caf6 chantant of Paris. Since then, she has passed through many phases, a singer of ancient and popular ballads in the music hall, a diseuse of the Com6die Franqaise, an interpreter to the United States of a peculiarly individual and at the same time essentially French art, and finally, after definitely becoming a resident of America, as a teacher of direction and expression.)

HERE is Goncourt's impression of the first time he saw Yvette Guilbert at a dinner given by Jean Lorrain. "No, she isn't beautiful: a flat face, a nose that has nothing Greek in it, eyes with a wild light in them, eyelids rather Satanical, a heap of reddish hair; there's the woman. She has a feverish animation, a vivacity of words vastly amusing. She described the famous lunch Rougon-Macquart in the Bois de Boulogne, with caricatures of the guests and of the way they jeered at Zola. What is original in her jesting verve is that it is modern; it is enamelled with the epithets of symbolical and decadent poets, with archaic expressions, old verbs such as 'deambuler': a pot-pourri of the Parisianisms of the present hour, and of the ancient facetious language of Panurge. When I complimented her on the intelligent manner in which she had said Rollinat's verses, she told me how little success she had had, on this very night when she had said them, and when some of the audience had cried at her during her declamation: 'Et la Messe?'"

This is noted June 28th, 1893; on March 7th, 1895, he notes: "Et la Soiree se termine par La Foularde d'Yvette Guilbert, ou la diseuse de chansonnettes, se revele comme une grande, une tres grande actrice tragique, vous mettant au coeur une constriction angoisseuse."

After that Goncourt praises Sarah, "dans sa toilette d'idole, et sa seduction indefinissable de magicienne antique."

Yvette is the one woman of genius, of a new startling kind, among many notable and remarkable persons of talent. Yvette, within this range that the music-hall allows her, is a great creative artist; she creates the very mood in which one listens to her. You go to any music-hall feeling in key with the coloured gaiety of the place, the showy illusions of its lights and dances and upholstery. Yvette begins to sing, and immediately the gay world that you see across the smoke of your cigarette, seems to unmask itself, becomes too suddenly serious, tragic, a piece of real existence. Her pathos draws tears, her terror an actual shudder; when she is cynical, there is no room in the scheme of things but for a vast irony. When she is most witty and daring, one seems to breathe the very freedom of Paris.

Les Ingenues is a slight study in 'Les demoi- selles de pensionnat', or 'Les demoiselles a marier'&emdash;they were one and the same; it is essentially of the genre Yvette Guilbert; it is witty, malicious, significant, and rendered with exquisite skill in the fine shades. But the most remarkable song was Richepin's La Glu, one of those grotesquely tragic songs which are, after all, his finest successes. Then, indeed, one shuddered, one's very nerves cried out; and is not that the aim of the modem artist in sensations?

Her Songs

ALWAYS Yvette is the same artist; her art is a very personal kind of art, but she is a great impersonal artist, absolutely mistress of herself and of her material. Her voice creates an atmosphere by a single inflexion, her face expresses every mood suggested by her voice. La Legende de Saint Nicolas was a quaint, half childish, and altogether naiive piece, different from anything else I have ever heard her sing; it had some of her pointed simplicity, some of her gravity, some of her mysterious suggestion. Je suis dans le Bottin, supposed to be said by the man of the world, in the directory', to the man who has not got on in the world (one of Aristide Bruant's monologues) had all the realism of a close character-study, taken directly from life, perfectly imitated, without a touch of exaggeration. Partie Carree was very French, very amusing, depending on the naturalness of the rhythm for most of its effect; it was done with a whimsical chuckling consciousness of its fun and with an admirable gravity.

All these were good in different ways, each showed a different facet of her talent, but she was at her best in Ma Tete. It is one of those songs of the gutter by which she first made her fame, a song of the gutter in which the gutter remains what it is, and yet becomes beautiful. It goes from the prostitute to the guillotine, and ends With the last convulsive shiver of the head as it falls into the basket. It is a little drama and every stanza takes one farther along a certain sordid downward way. Every stanza has its own expression of face and of voice, as the jaunty humour of the beginning fades out of it, and it darkens to the last horror. And it was here, more perhaps than in any of her other songs, that one saw the purity of her art, its fine consuming intensity; for here was a thing which would be but the masterpiece which she made it, or else gross and vulgar.

What she has sung for the most part has been, indeed, 'the pity of unpitied human things', as I have elsewhere called it: the pity of vice, of evil, of the misery which, men and women make for themselves. Her art, in rendering what is most sordid and most degraded in the world, has always been clean, because compassionate and distinguished, because intellectual. She has made an art of her own which in its own way is a great art. Nothing more deliberate, more finished, more completely achieved, is to be seen on our stage; and there is not an effect of which she is not wholly conscious. She caff repeat every night, without a hair's breadth of difference, the apparently spontaneous start, shiver, cry, discord, smile, gesture or holding back of gesture. Her face is a mirror of the passions, and her voice speaks for each in its own language.

In addition to singing La Soularde, La Grand, Mere and Ma Tete, she gave a series of songs by Baudelaire and Rollinat, set to music by Rollinat. I had not heard Rollinat's music, and it interested me, as a poet's music always does, because it is not music at all, but the expression of a poem in sound. Sung as they were, with every gesture of the words visibly audible, in the voice, these songs seemed to me to have a strange illegitimate beauty of their own. It was like a child crooning to itself, without knowing what it is saying. The splendid and ghastly sonnet of Baudelaire, La Causerie, was certainly never meant to be set to music, never meant to be sung; but this setting in which the music wanders round the words like a bee skimming around a flower, and their meaning, in which every word has its own expression quite apart from the expression of the music, gave one not less certainly the charm of a new interpretation. To Les Yeux of Rollinat, Yvette gave an unwilling beauty with intensity of expression, and beauty of vocal intonation with that almost surgical cutting open of the living flesh of words, which is her gift. In these songs she has her own material over again,material which others have left common, but which she transforms into an art wholly distinguished, in which she is supreme.

'Les demo, demoidemoigutteains