Evelyn Millard (1869-1941)
Evelyn Millard (1869-1941)
(The Wheelwoman [Ladies cycling weekly - UK], 23rd May, 1896)
NOTABLE WHEELWOMEN
A CHAT WITH MISS EVELYN MILLARD
"Wonderful is the reward of patience," said the prophet, and so I thought when, after waiting until the third act of the "Prisoner of Zenda" was concluded, I saw the beautiful heroine, "Princess Flavia," and had a few minutes chat with her upon cycling, and herself as a cyclist.
Miss Millard has not cycled very long, but she is a firm believer in wheeling for women, and especially for ladies in her own profession, who by its means secure that which is so necessary to them, pleasant healthful outdoor exercise of not too tiring a nature. The doctors concurred in saying it was the best recreation possible for them, and it was not difficult to see that Miss Millard herself was more than ready to endorse the opinion of the medical faculty.
A dainty little Beeston Humber is first favorite with the beautiful young actress, and the dress she chooses to ride in, is a neat skirt and coat which adds considerably to the grace of the rider. It's only a few weeks since the Press was inundated with paragraphs relating to Miss Millard's accident while cycling near the seat of Sir Francis Jeune at Newbury, but she does not bear any traces on her face of the ugly scratches she was said to have received; neither in her powerful acting is there anything that would lead the large audiences to believe she was suffering from extreme nervous shock engendered by the same accident.
The facts are that Miss Millard, riding down a hill, saw that a spill was inevitable, so preferring to take it in the ditch, rather than on the hard road, deliberately guided her machine into the hedge, where she was speedily thrown. The result being a few scratches, a slight shock, and big Shake.
The morning and early afternoon are the times most preferred for riding by those who make the evenings so enjoyable for us at the principal theatres of the metropolis.
In answer to my question whether she thought cycling had come to stop Miss Millard said "Yes," in the manner positive. But she does not believe that the present extraordinary boom will be with us long, rather that the art of cycling will continue to grow in popularity as the years go on, as a really sensible and all but perfect means of locomotion for women who are brain workers.
Then came the choice of photographs and a cordial "Goodnight," and in a few seconds I heard Miss Millard's clear tones commanding "Curtain up," and the radient figure in gleaming white passed from my sight into the wings, and I was left wondering whether I had really had a pleasant little chat with a genuine princess, or with a sweet-faced woman named Evelyn Millard.
The fair cyclist is reported to be engaged to Mr. Anthony Hope, the famous author of the play, "The Prisoner of Zenda," to the interest of which his fiancee conduces in no small degree by the grace with which she acts the much-tried Princess Flavia.
(from "Adventures In London" by James Douglas - Cassell and Company, Limited: 1909)
EVELYN MILLARD
Miss EVELYN MILLARD has been our idol ever since we fell in love with her Ursula and her Flavia. She will always be our idol. Like Ephraim, we are fond of idols, and it would be well if all our idols were as lovely and as gracious and as sweet as she. We do not care a straw what part she plays, for to us she is always the idolised idol we all love on the other side of idolatry. We are simple, honest, plain folk, and we are not ashamed of our enslavement. We do not worship Evelyn Millard merely as an actress. No: we worship her as a woman. We worship her, as we worshipped Mary Anderson and Lily Langtry, because she is our ideal Englishwoman.
She gathers up into her stately and majestic person all the traditional charms of all our traditional charmers. They say she is the daughter of Professor John Millard, the elocutionist. She is nothing of the sort. She is a daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair. You will find her in all the poems of Tennyson. She is that very Maud whose lover in one mood implored her to come into the garden and in another mood denounced her as being faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null. You will find her in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy. She smiles her placid smile in the pictures of Millais and Marcus Stone. Bless my soul! she crops up wherever you choose to look for her in our drama, our poetry, our fiction, and our painting.
Evelyn Millard is as delightfully English as Sarah Bernhardt is delightfully French. You cannot think of a British Bernhardt or a French Millard. The gulf between the English actress and the French actress is profound. After her marriage, Miss Millard threw up her part in a play by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, because certain lines in it seemed to her to be indecorous in the mouth of a bride. That point of view would be impossible across the Channel, but here the woman is more important than the actress, and we prefer to think of the woman first and the actress afterwards. Where the dignity of a woman clashes with the dignity of dramatic art, it is dramatic art that must give way. The charm of Sarah Bernhardt is her incorrigible artifice, but the charm of Evelyn Millard is her incorrigible innocence. After eighteen years of stage traffic, she is utterly unspoiled and absolutely unsophisticated.
The girl still holds the woman at arm's length. She obstinately refuses to grow up. She indignantly declines to mature. She satisfies our conservative instincts, and we rejoice in the certainty that there is at least one national institution which cannot be destroyed. It is good to know that we can renew our first thrill every time we see her. We may change, but she does not. Her Flavian smiles and her Flavian tears are undimmed and undammed by time. The wine of Anthony Hope grows drier and drier in its bin, but his Flavia grows sweeter and sweeter in an age that urges womanhood to grow sourer and sourer.
There are many melancholy young men among us who have never seen a womanly woman. I advise them to go and behold Evelyn Millard displaying triumphantly the bewildering fascinations of that extinct creature. They are lucky to have the chance, for there will never be another specimen so bewitching of the wonderful darlings our happy ancestors adored.
There is nothing that is not lovable in Evelyn Millard. Her lofty beauty is free from the fashionable taint of fierce masculinity. Her face has the surrendering softness that infuriates Mr. Bernard Shaw. There is no battling arrogance in her large, beseeching eyes. There is no pugnacious defiance in the delicate curves of her caressing mouth. Her lips do not suggest the platform and the polling-booth. She is frankly and shamelessly unmanly. She flaunts her helpless loveliness and rejoices in her clinging fragility. She exults in her tender inadequacy. She is not in the least humiliated by the frailty of her sex. On the contrary, she likes to exaggerate its tremulous fears, its delicate sighs, and its beautiful anxieties. She is a flower that does not pretend to be a rock, and she realises that it is as much the duty of the flower to be flower-like as it is the duty of a rock to be rocky.
The prevalent type of womanhood is the cat. As a rule it is the wild cat and not the domestic cat. There is no cattishness in Evelyn Millard. I am not sure that we deserve her, for she is almost too sweet and good for human nature's daily food. Her kindness is too mellifluously kind. Her gentleness is too cloyingly gentle. She makes real men dissatisfied with real women. She sets an impossible example to her harsher sisters. It is all very well for her to arouse wild hopes of a reasserted sovereignty in the male breast, but it is rather hard on the strong, silent women who have to live up to her swooning weakness and fainting gracility. How on earth can they vie with her beaming virtue after they leave the theatre? To do them justice, they do not try, for no ordinary woman could scale the Alps of amiability over which she trips like a fairy martyr.
There is no doubt that the profession of martyr agrees with Evelyn Millard. She is at her best when the male is at his worst. She revels in being wronged by a lover, and she thrives upon masculine misunderstanding. Like an April day, she sparkles most irresistibly when she is dressed in tears. When she is heartbroken her voice fills us with a sacred joy, and we forgive her male tormentors for the sake of her sweet and sugary grief. The more she suffers the more we enjoy ourselves. We would not flinch if she sobbed continuously through three acts. Yet we are not callous brutes. Off the stage the spectacle of a weeping woman unmans us, but we gloat like emotional fiends over the vibrating agonies of our champion Niobe.
Her liquid moans fill us with holy rapture and her fluent sobs plunge us into an ecstasy of celestial delight. Can you explain this paradox? Why do we shudder at real tears and exult in sham tears? Are we monsters? Why do we extract aesthetic pleasure from the anguish of our beloved Evelyn? She cannot suffer enough to sate our thirst for suffering. What is stranger still, we not only like to see her weeping Niagaras of woe, but we also like to weep with her, until the theatre is damp with her tears and ours.
In most modern plays love is an ugly passion. Evelyn Millard reminds us that love was once a romantic sentiment. Her innocence almost amounts to ignorance. She helps us to remember the good old times when even a stage woman was an angel transfigured by a spiritual devotion. She compels us to believe in her goodness, for she exhibits an imagination that is clear and pure and radiant. Her heroines not only do no evil they think no evil. They are glowingly stainless and brightly serene. They are morally healthy without being cold, valiantly amorous without being sensuous. They fall in love without losing their dignity. They give their hearts without losing their souls. There is a fine reserve in their affection, like ice in the sunlight. Even when they melt they are cool, and their tenderest kisses are fresh with reluctance. In a word, they are English heroines, loving with their spirit more than with their blood, and apter at loyalty than at allurement.
There is a noble beauty in their fidelity. They move like sorrowful queens who are glad to suffer and endure rather than to exact and extort. They are careless of their rights and they glory in their wrongs. Their throne is the hearth and their kingdom is the home.