CHAPTER XXXIX

MRS. JEUNE, LADY JEUNE, AND LADY ST. HELIER

The interesting people are the exceptional people; not those cast in a mould common to others, not those whose lives run in a groove but those who fashion their own lives in obedience to the dictates of a nature which is their own. Among the women of London it would be easy to choose those of higher rank or greater position than Lady St. Helier, but I choose her because she is Lady St. Helier.

Whether the marriage of Mrs. Stanley to Mr. Francis Jeune, in 1881, was or was not considered a social event of the first importance I cannot say. I was not then in London. But that it became important in no long time is clear. It was first as Mrs. Jeune and then as Lady Jeune that the present Lady St. Helier achieved her great distinction as a hostess. She was not content to do what other ladies of position were in the habit of doing. She struck out a line for herself. I said lately that London was a world in which everything of the first rank in many differing ranks and professions met at times beneath the same roofs. That was not always true. It was very far from being true.

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If you go back no further than the eighteenth century you find in England a society consisting of perhaps three hundred or four hundred persons. If we may judge by the memoirs and memories that have come down to us it was a very brilliant society, perhaps more brilliant, though less varied, than the society of to-day. But it was not comprehensive, still less was it cosmopolitan. It was a caste. The hereditary principle prevailed. It was a society into which you had to take the precaution to be born. If you were not born into it you never found your way in. There was no effort to keep people outside of it. None was required. The people who were outside did not dream of forcing themselves in. There was no reason why this little clique should be on the defence. The Climbers did not then exist, as an aggressive body, or as a force of any kind. If you read Boswell's Life, or Walpole's Letters, or the Life of Selwyn, or any political memoirs of the time, it is clear that the dividing line between those who were in society and those who were not was a broad one, and was all but impassable.

It has long ceased to be, and the steps by which it was worn away can be traced. But if we come at once to the 'eighties of the last century we see a condition of things which, a hundred years before that, would have seemed to the social leaders of that day fantastic. The revolution had gone far; it had already become an evolution; and, of course, the end was not yet. It needed a Mrs. Jeune to carry it on to its full development. And {373} since the individual is but one expression of those natural forces which are, in such cases, the operative forces, there is no reason why Nature should not supply the individual as she does the other energies needed for the work she has in hand. At any rate, she supplied Mrs. Jeune, and London is to-day a different place from the London we should have known had there been no Mrs. Jeune.

For Society, in the mixed form now prevailing, is supposed to be not only a compromise between conflicting forces but the result of much careful diplomacy. Lady Jersey was a diplomatist. Lady Palmerston was a diplomatist. The late King was pre-eminently a diplomatist. Whether from temperament or calculation I know not, but Mrs. Jeune cast diplomacy to the winds. The one gift which stood to her in the place of all others was courage. She brought together at the same table, or under the same roof at Arlington Manor, people the most unlike. Each one of her guests had some kind of distinction, or some claim to social recognition. They might or might not have anything in common.

Mrs. George Cornwallis West, whom we still think of as Lady Randolph Churchill, once gave at her house in Connaught Place, by the Marble Arch, looking out on Hyde Park, what she called a dinner of deadly enemies. It was thought a hazardous experiment. It proved a complete success. They were all well-bred people. They all recognized their obligations to their hostess as paramount for the time being. They were Lady {374} Randolph's guests. That was enough. As guests they were neither friends nor enemies. There were no hostilities. The talk flowed on smoothly. When a man found himself sent in to dinner with a woman to whom he did not speak, his tongue was somehow unloosed. It was a truce. In some cases ancient animosities were softened. In all they were suspended. The guests all knew each other, and as they looked about the table they all saw that Lady Randolph had attempted the impossible and had conquered. A social miracle had been performed.

What Lady Randolph did for that one evening Mrs. Jeune did night after night and year after year. There was not on her part, I presume, any conscious intention of bringing irreconcilables into contact with each other. What Mrs. Jeune did was simply to take no note of the fact that they were irreconcilables. Her policy, if policy it were, had therefore the kind of validity which comes to a man or to a woman from not appearing to be aware of the obvious. That is a great resource in debate, and a great resource in that larger debate which broadens into human intercourse. The average man is rather apt to do what he sees is expected of him. As a guest he has hardly a choice. When he enters a front door he puts himself under the dominion of his hostess. If he is a man of the world, his philosophy is to take what is offered him. If he is not, he is chiefly concerned to do as others do whom he supposes to be more familiar than himself with the manners {375} and customs of Society. Very rarely therefore does anything like a collision occur and almost never so long as the company is of two sexes.

Mrs. Jeune may or may not have thought this out, or she may have acted from those intuitions which in women supply the place of reason and are, for all social purposes and some others, more useful than reason. People who did not like her used to say that all she cared for was to get celebrities together. They professed to think she was a Mrs. Leo Hunter and her collections of guests so many menageries. If that had been so they would soon have been dispersed, nor would Mrs. Jeune, or the Lady Jeune of later days, or the present Lady St. Helier, ever have attained to the rank she did as hostess. She offered Society what nobody else offered, novelty, which is the one thing Society craves beyond all others. Said a man who went everywhere:

"I go to Lady Jeune's because I never know whom I shall meet, but I know there will always be somebody I shall like to meet."

By the side of which I will set an anecdote not unlike it. At a dinner I was next a lady who knew everybody, and there was a man at table whom she did not know. She asked:

"Who is that?"

"Mr. Justice Stephen."

"Why have I never seen him? He looks a man everybody ought to know. But it is a rare pleasure to meet somebody you do not know."

I will give the other side in another anecdote. {376} A smart party. A stream of guests coming up a famous staircase. Two in a balcony looking down on the arrivals.

He: "Who is that?"

She: "I don't know."

He: "But you know everybody."

She: "Nobody knows everybody."

There spoke the voice of authority. Society in London is now so multitudinous that even a bowing acquaintance between its less conspicuous members is not universal. It was Lady Jeune's mission to bring together those who stood apart. She swept into her net many a foreigner who but for her might have remained a foreigner. I will venture to guess that Lady St. Helier's invitation was one of the few unofficial invitations which Mr. Roosevelt accepted for his brief stay in London. They met twenty years ago or more when Mr. Roosevelt was in London, and made friends. He used to make friendly inquiries about Mrs. Jeune, as Mrs. Jeune did about him, year by year, and I often carried friendly messages from each to the other. She will surround him with delightful people, among whom there will be one or two or three he had never heard of; and when he has met them will wonder he had not known them always.

Lady St. Helier has published a book of Reminiscences which I have not yet read. I am therefore borrowing a little of her courage in giving my own account of some matters which she may have dealt with, and perhaps from a different point of view. But I must take that risk. I prefer taking {377} it. If my testimony, or anybody's testimony, is to have any value it must be from its independence.

Mrs. Jeune lived for many years in Wimpole Street; then moved to Harley Street, and then, after Lord St. Helier's death, in 1905, to Portland Place. Their place in the country was Arlington Manor, near Newbury, in Berkshire, the scene of the battle, in 1643, in which Lord Falkland, despairing of peace, says his biographer, threw his life away. There stands a monument on the battlefield erected not many years ago with an inscription by the late Lord Carnarvon, himself a kind of nineteenth-century Falkland, who threw away his political future in an impossible attempt to come to terms with Mr. Parnell, Lord Carnarvon also despairing of peace. The inscription is a piece of literature for ever.

At Arlington it was Lady Jeune's delight to gather about her some of the men and women she really liked, and who really liked her. The house was not large, and was devoid of all other splendour than such as the beauty of its position and view and park and gardens gave it. But it was the home of comfort and charm. Now it has passed into other hands and Lady St. Helier has built herself another house, known as Cold Ash. But the memories of Arlington will never pass.

Perhaps it was in Arlington that Lady Jeune's gifts as hostess were to be seen at their best. It is one thing to take charge of a dinner, another to handle a difficult team from Saturday to Monday, or often longer. Freedom of choice is a thing {378} which has to be paid for. But to her this was no task. She had good hands, and a touch so delicate that you were guided without knowing you had a bit in your mouth. It was a skill which all depended on kindness and sympathy; and these belonged to her in overflowing measure.

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