# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 10

Chapter X
Dining with a Hungarian Noble
A Plea for the Grand Seigneur
TO-DAY I had to borrow the toga of respectability, for I was asked to dine by a Magyar Baron—a real Baron with estates who might have strayed out of eighteenth-century romance. He entered my life by one of those curious turns of the wheel of Fortune. I was playing with a Gypsy band from Parad, in the café at Mezökövesd, and I was teaching them several Russian Gypsy melodies and dances which they played with gusto, when a lonely gentleman tapped his glass and called for Lajos, the ubiquitous waiter. Lajos came over to me with a message to say that I was to play the “Red Sarafan”; when we complied with the request, the old gentleman clapped loudly and asked us to drink some wine. He was a very aristocratic-looking old gentleman with long hair that gave him the look of Abbé Liszt in 1880. His nose was aquiline, his forehead full and his eyes as eager as those of a hawk. He made me a pretty speech in perfect French and welcomed me as a stranger. His manners were as courtly as any courtier of the Longhi period, and he certainly had, in the George Meredith sense, “a leg.” My mind associated him with all kinds of Hungarian patrons of arts. I thought of Prince Esterhazy first of all, and the vision of Haydn composing rose before me. ​The old gentleman told me that he had his quartet, but he would only play Mozart and he did not care for modern music. “I like music that fits in with my scheme of life in my old house. I like a long hall with plenty of space for the sound to lose itself and I like music that permits us to linger on beauty and enjoy its fragrance. Mozart’s music is an echo of the past when men enjoyed the good things of life and took their ease. To-day there is such rush and bustle that musicians think they must gallop all the time and jolt and harass our ears with discords which make me feel as if I were in the dentist’s chair. Everything in life should be in its place, my dear sir: when I am out on the Puszta, no one loves a gallop more than I do on our mettlesome Hungarian horses, but when I enter my drawing-room I want to see beautifully-dressed women working at embroidery or else chattering gaily. What has happened to the urbane manners that used to charm the world? Modern life has killed conversation just as it has killed letter-writing.”
Very soon I became close friends with the Baron, and he would call to take me with him when he went in his motor on trips through the country. I was surprised to find him in a car, though it was the old Ford model, but he explained to me that he had relations in Budapest whom he had to visit frequently. One evening he asked me to his house to dine, and when I arrived at the house, which was some miles from Miskolc, I found my Gypsy friends from Parad with their instruments. They had been engaged to play at the dinner. When I at last sat down to table, behind his chair stood the Primás, and by the time we were busy eating our gulyás he had roused the band to csárdás. Whenever the Baron wanted a particular tune, he would hum in his cracked voice and then all of a sudden the band would dash into the tune, ​improvising harmony and scattering grace notes, trills, staccati as if they were fireflies on a summer night. Every time the violinist would play 2 new tune, the old host would enter the lists with his discordant bass voice and he would beat the time with his hand. Then he would rise up and wave his arms in time with the music as it increased in pace.
As I watched his behaviour towards the humble musicians from Parad, I felt the full force of the Magyar noble personality. The Magyar aristocrat is unlike any of us who dwell in Nordic climes: he has no false shame about himself. It is not necessary to remind him that he is a noble, for he is so absolutely convinced of it that he makes no attempt to persuade you. He knows that the aristocrat is, as Keyserling would say, a distinct sociological species, and that his whole life has been mapped out in accordance with that law. In our semi-democratic society, we are not sure of ourselves and very often we attempt in a shuffling, uncertain way to prop up our sense of dignity. There are more trivial rules of precedence in our bourgeois society than in any ancient concourse of nobles invited by my friend the Baron at his estate. At home I have seen the faces of hosts line with perplexity when it was time to troop into dinner. The wife of the town councillor should go in on the arm of Sir Something X, but Lady X would then be offended because her husband is more important than the town councillor. And in all the affairs of life there is the same uncertain attempt to assume a dignity that is not rooted within ourselves.
It is sad to think that countries such as Hungary and Spain are the last bulwarks in this modern standardized world of the Grand Seigneur whose charm is due to his sense of his own position and his refusal to compare himself with others. He can thus afford to ​give reins to his own temperament in a way that none of us would dare. He acts, not because he follows any code of conduct or convention, but because he feels within himself the necessity of that force of action. Whereas we ask ourselves ceaselessly the question: “Am I acting in accordance with the standards expected of us? Should we not lower ourselves in the eyes of others if we allowed our temperament to take the bit between its teeth?”
After some glasses of Tokay and a few csárdás the Baron became Dionysiac in his elation. The slow lassu, followed by the fast friss, alternately slackened and tightened his nature and he let himself go either way. At one moment when relaxed, he would become as languidly melancholic as an Oriental: at other moments he would rouse himself to rigid rhythms and ride rough-shod over all obstacles in the surging music. The Magyar songs show the variety of his life since his race descended on the Puszta in hordes from Central Asia: at one moment he charges the enemy, at another he dashes along on his horse in the excitement of the chase; at home in his castle he rests with his lady, and the eternal Gypsy, a sardonic Sancho Panza, plays to the expression on his face and rouses him from one emotion to another.
When I questioned the Baron on the variability of the Magyar songs he exclaimed: “Those songs bring tears of sadness into our eyes or make us shout with joy because they speak to us of our history. They tell us of the summer days when the sun beats down with relentless fury on the Puszta, and there is no shade: of the winter days when the land is ice-bound and winds whistle over the snowy steppes. Such was the varying terms of our history. At one moment a peace-loving monarch of enlightened views such as King Stephen or King Ladislaus the Saint, both of them chevaliers sans ​peur et sans reproche in Magyar chivalry, or else King Matthias Corvinus, the soldier and artist. Hardly had those Kings set their seal on great achievements, when the country would be plunged in war so relentless that it looked as though two Genii were presiding over our destinies. The Spirit of Good would work her influence and redeem the country; next moment the Spirit of Evil would laugh harshly as she laid in ruins all the lofty schemes.” The Baron was now deeply immersed in thoughts of his country and the impish little Gypsy Primás vainly tried to catch his eve as he played “unbuttoned” tunes such as “Lyuk, Lyuk.” He advanced so close to my host that he all but stuck his violin into his face. The Baron at first paid no attention to him, but suddenly he gave him a box on the ears which sent the little fellow spinning on the ground, violin and all, then he continued: “ We Hungarians like to dream of the far-off Arpád, the legendary hero who was the symbol of Wisdom. It was he who united the roving bands and made himself Prince over them. The chiefs of the tribe lifted him up on a shield and then poured some drops of their blood into a bronze cup as a pledge to be faithful for ever. Rugged warriors they were, those Arpáds, as they swept on from Asia in unrelenting onslaught; they were nomads and the life of settled communities was not to their liking. We have always within us the craze for wandering, and when I was young I would leave my father’s castle and rove through the whole extent of Hungary, the greater Hungary alas, and live with the peasants on the Puszta, singing with them those songs that are echoes of past wars, when the Turks ravaged our country in their advance on Buda. For me Petöfi is the poet of Hungary—the spirit of the eternal plains where man is free. Out there his soul was like an eagle freed from prison. Ask any peasant ​in the tiniest hovel about Rákoczi, our national hero, and he will tell uou that he is as living to-day as in the year 1707.”
As the Baron was speaking I kept thinking of the comparisons between Hungary and England. In the case of the latter the stability of its government lay in the fact that a people aristocratic in tendency and Republican by temperament turned at the right historic moment to the Democratic form of state and the ideal became that everyone should be a gentleman. In Hungary the ideal is not the gentleman, but the Grand Seigneur, which I should like to symbolize by my friend the white-haired baron living in his castle with his retinue of peasants, who so far from envying his exceptional position are proud of it because he is, as they say, a richer branch of the same tree, and they are all fully conscious that they partake in the nobility as free-born Magyars.
It 1s for this reason that I never noticed a trace of servile obeisance given to the Baron’s family by any of the workers on his estate. Their attitude was one of equality, and more than once I saw him drinking with them in the same inn. All the time I was with him I was irresistibly reminded of Spain, where the peasant stood in the same relation to the lord of the Manor and both possessed the characteristic of true Nobleza. I could not help praying that the day may come in Europe when Democracy is thrown back on itself and its devotees will create a society not on the level of a “lower” but on that of an “upper class.” When that day comes Society will resemble a tree all of whose branches draw the same sap from the roots, and blossom out in the same flowers. Such would be the ideal of my Baron who lives his lonely life on his estate, devoting himself to agriculture—a statuesque old man, symbol of an older generation that has all but disappeared from the world.