go," he said. She stammered her
acknowledgment of the fact. "It's true," she said. "I have been so
completely carried out of myself that I had forgotten!"

_August 22, 1916._

Yvette Guilbert

"_She sings of life, and mirth and all that moves_
_Man's fancy in the carnival of loves;_
_And a chill shiver takes me as she sings_
_The pity of unpitied human things._"

Arthur Symons.

The natural evolution of Gordon Craig's theory of the stage finally
brought him to the point where he would dispense altogether with the
play and the actor. The artist-producer would stand alone. Yvette
Guilbert has accomplished this very feat, and accomplished it without
the aid of super-marionettes. She still uses songs as her medium, but
she has very largely discarded the authors and composers of these songs,
recreating them with her own charm and wit and personality and brain. A
song as Yvette Guilbert sings it exists only for a brief moment. It does
not exist on paper, as you will discover if you seek out the printed
version, and it certainly does not exist in the performance of any one
else. Not that most of her songs are not worthy material, chosen as they
are from the store-houses of a nation's treasures, but that her
interpretations are so individual, so charged with deep personal
feeling, so emended, so added to, so embellished with grunts, shrieks,
squeaks, trills, spoken words, extra bars, or even added lines to the
text; so performed that their performance itself constitutes a veritable
(and, unfortunately, an extremely perishable) work of art. Sometimes,
indeed, it has seemed to me that the genius of this remarkable
Frenchwoman could express itself directly, without depending upon songs.

She could have given no more complete demonstration of the inimitability
of this genius than by her recent determination to lecture on the art of
interpreting songs. Never has Yvette been more fascinating, never more
authoritative than during those three afternoons at Maxine Elliott's
Theatre, devoted ostensibly to the dissection of her method, but before
she had unpacked a single instrument it must have been perfectly obvious
to every auditor in the hall that she was taking great pains to explain
just how impossible it would be for any one to follow in her footsteps,
for any one to imitate her astonishing career. With evident candour and
a multiplicity of detail she told the story of how she had