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 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 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 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."