CHAPTER IV

MISCELLANEOUS

Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—Mrs Pankhurst—Jacob Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté

Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that extraordinary breath-catching passage in _Villette_ where Charlotte Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think, was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights, and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And who was it who wrote the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_? And even, after all, Aphra Behn ... well, _she_ knew something about women, didn’t she?

So that I feel only a woman can write at all convincingly of Yvette Guilbert. I must just gossip and prattle a little while.

I must have heard Yvette Guilbert a score of times. The first occasion was in the Midland Hall, Manchester, eight or ten years ago, when she sang to an audience of about two hundred frigid people who, apparently, knew as much French as I know of the language of the Serbs, and as much about Art as the pencil with which I write knows about the thoughts it records. Ernest Newman was there and, that night, wrote an article for _The Manchester Guardian_ that must have more than compensated Guilbert for the smallness of the audience. For she loves praise, even the praise she gives herself, as the following letter addressed to myself will testify:

Je reçois votre aimable lettre et votre _admirable article_!! Je ne peux pas vous dire toute _la joie_ que je ressens en lisant que vous comprenez _si bien_ mes efforts! Je n’ai jamais _su être hypocrite_ et j’ai toujours manqué de diplomatie dans la vie à cause de cela; aussi, je n’hésite pas à vous dire que je _crois_ sincèrement mériter vos bonnes paroles parce que je passe _ma vie entière_ à _me dévouer_ à mon art sans jamais de vacances. Mon amour pour le travail et la Beauté et tout ce qui est _pure_ en art est tout le “mateur” de mes forces intellectuelles. Merci d’avoir deviné ce que le public ne voit pas toujours. Mes mains dans les vôtres.

Yvette Guilbert.

Guilbert has no singing voice, and yet she sings. Her singing voice is small ... ever so small. Yet clear, distinct, expressive and, in the lowest register, most deep and thrilling. How little mere “voice” matters! Only consider. Here, on one hand, we have Madame Clara Butt with, I suppose, one of the most wonderful organs that this world, or any other world, has ever listened to. But would you walk five miles to hear her sing? I wouldn’t. You, I hope and believe, wouldn’t either. Would you walk five miles to hear Blanche Marchesi sing—Blanche Marchesi, whose voice, as mere voice, is like a hundred other voices? Of course you would. Voice matters little. It is the temperament, the intellect, behind the voice that counts. And the eternal struggle that Yvette Guilbert has had to undergo has been the struggle to make her comparatively small voice express the wonderful things of her imagination.

A gesture. A look. An inflection. Two paces on the platform. A little cry ... a little cry of dismay. A superb and beautiful signal that tells us the Mother of God is big with a Child. A tiny silence. A moment of jauntiness. Something arch and irresistible. Something tragic that makes you clench your fists....

One day Yvette Guilbert wrote to ask me to call on her. I did not go. One feels so foolish in the presence of genius. One’s vanity is hurt. One is afraid of being found out.

* * * * *

In the early days of the war I visited Sir Victor Horsley several times at his home. I was interested in shell shock, in the influence that the horror of war has on certain types of human nature, and he was good enough to supply me with a great deal of information. Quiet and undemonstrative, he used always to stand, or move slowly up and down the room; in the long talks we had together, I do not remember his sitting down once.

I don’t think I ever met a man more careful to express his exact meaning; he appeared to have a horror of exaggeration and he qualified nearly every statement he made. In discussing scientific subjects such scrupulous carefulness is, of course, not only wise but necessary, and when, later on, I wrote a newspaper article on the effect that the strain and horror of war have on the human brain, Sir Victor showed himself very anxious that, in quoting his views, I should do so in language that could not possibly be interpreted in two different senses.

He told me what my own experience in France and Salonica in 1915–1917 confirmed later on, that it is frequently the neurotic, the artistic, the excitable man who most quickly adapts himself to, and is least disturbed by, the incredible cruelties of warfare, whilst the phlegmatic type of man is more liable to be broken by those cruelties. Sir Victor Horsley suggested that this was, in some measure, due to the fact that the neurotic man has, in imagination, tasted the terror of war before he has actually experienced it; that he has, as it were, prepared his mind for the shock it is to receive. The unimaginative man cannot do this, so that when his turn comes to go to the trenches and witness stark horrors, his nervous system reacts most violently.

Sir Victor spoke a good deal to me about the evil influence of drink, and continually regretted that rum was served out to our soldiers. On this subject, of course, though I disagreed with him profoundly, I did not attempt to argue, though I pointed out that Napoleon had won many of his campaigns by almost drugging his men with spirits. To this he made no reply, though he shook his head gravely and seemed to ponder a little.

My last interview with him was in his long, bare dining-room, where, as we stood before the fire, he described to me in a low, serious voice two or three war cases of mental trouble (functional, of course, not organic), and I could see that the war was, so to speak, closing in around him and enveloping him with its violent appeals, its tragic interests.

* * * * *

Mrs Pankhurst I met only once, but the impression she has left on my mind is that of a most vivid personality. I saw her in many ridiculous situations that would have made almost any other person look positively foolish; but Mrs Pankhurst’s sense of personal dignity is so strong, her personality is so imperious, and, above all, she possesses so much humour and good sense, that it is impossible to imagine any situation, however grotesque, that would render her ridiculous.

My interview with her was at the close of a day during which she had worked incessantly. She was tired, and her face was lined and rather