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 [49] ]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.