bathos, with his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd fortissimi and the general air of kidding the piece.
He does not generally kid his Mammy songs—as why should he who sings them better than any one else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs, until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them. I dislike them and dislike his doing them—as I dislike Belle Baker singing Elie, Elie! But it is quite possible that my discomfort at these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson's only faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established an intimate relation with no less than a million people every twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing which sets him so far above all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what he is doing, but one sees that he doesn’t half realize the power and intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help thinking of him as a genius.
Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn't reached. She hasn't, to begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate mind and a richer humour—qualities which generally destroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediaeval France for us in ten lines of a song. The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny's evocations are as vivid and as poignant as Yvette's—they require from us exactly the same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and made immortal, I Should Worry. Hear her now creating the tragedy of Second-Hand Rose or of the one Florodora Baby—"five little dumbells got married for money And I got married for love. . . ." These things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert's material missing, for there are no accessories and although the words (some of the best are by
