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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