Book review: Lost Prestige

Lost Prestige, by historian, diplomat and former Hungarian Foreign Minister Géza Jeszenszky, now published in English translation, is a book about reputation. Using British perceptions of Hungary in the years leading up to the First World War, it seeks to examine more broadly the relationships between states, and how international reactions to particular events can shape universal judgements. We have all become used to seeing opinions presented as general consensus by a manipulative Press, or appearing to have traction on an unedited social media, but what does this really reveal? We are in a hall of mirrors, Jeszenszky suggests. And behind this, as the silvering on the mirror, lies moral posturing or vested interest. 

No mirror is perfect: every looking glass, however well made, distorts the image, sometimes in subtle ways. Nor is the person who looks in the mirror an impartial spectator: they are looking for a reflection that will show them what they want to see or that will flatter their sense of self. 

The specific conundrum with which Jeszenszky grapples is this: In 1848, Hungary rebelled against Austria, demanding its constitutional freedoms. Hungarians gained wide international support, particularly in Britain, and came to be seen as a noble people standing up bravely against oppressive and absolutist masters. By 1914 this reputation was in tatters and it was Hungary, rather than Austria, who was regarded as authoritarian and chauvinistic. How did this happen?

If we cannot see things directly ourselves, we rely on mirrors and lenses for information. Lost Prestige is an examination of how the perception of things and the way those perceptions are presented can alter the course of history. Immediately after 1848, Hungarians were largely telling their own story. The anti-Habsburg revolutionary Ferenc Pulszky spent his exile in Britain and his wife Theresa wrote a best-selling memoir in English. The architect of the revolution, Lajos Kossuth, toured Britain and America giving talks to enthusiastic audiences. But although reactions were widely favourable, the Habsburg empire was nevertheless still seen as integral to the European balance of power. Voicing public support for plucky Hungary’s bid for independence was one thing, but Britain’s mandarins were privately pleased when in 1849 Russia stepped in to crush the revolution and to restore the integrity of Austria. A fully independent Hungary was not in Britain’s interests. It was a romantic idea, perhaps, but not a sensible one. In the first years of the 20th century, however, two influential British commentators appeared: Henry Wickham Steed (Vienna correspondent of the Times), and R.W. Seton-Watson, a journalist and campaigner. Initially both men were great champions of Hungary but over time their attitudes became more and more critical. Their conclusions not only swayed the opinions of the British public; they also began to influence British foreign policy, in Hungary’s disfavour. How and why?

By the 1890s, Hungary was no longer the underdog. She was widely seen to have received a “good deal” in the Compromise agreement of 1867, when the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary came into being, but the huge bulk of her non-Magyar population—Croats, Slovaks, Romanians and others—lacked political representation. International sympathies now turned to these marginalised minorities. Britain had another reason, too, for deploring Hungary’s attitude: internal conflicts between Magyars and non-Magyars blinded the country as a whole to the external threats besetting it. In holding up a mirror to Hungary, Britain hoped to see a bulwark against German ambition. Instead it saw selfish, Magyar-centric chauvinism, an arrogant assumption that the prosperity Hungary enjoyed was all of her own making, and petty quarrelsomeness with Austria in demanding more rights for herself while denying those same rights to her non-Magyar peoples. Hungary’s obstreperousness in obstructing the proper workings of Parliament and stubbornly insisting on a Hungarian language of command (instead of German) in the Hungarian army (despite the fact that almost half of its soldiers were not Magyars) was widely deplored. For decades the existence of a united Austria-Hungary had been central to British policy, its dissolution unthinkable. Britain now began to think about it.

It was at this point that Wickham Steed and Seton-Watson came into their own. The Monarchy’s Slavs, Wickham Steed reported, were more reliably anti-German than the Hungarians. Partition of Austria and the creation of new buffer states along ethnic lines might be a better safeguard against German domination of the region. The creation of such states would bring the added advantage of liberating peoples groaning under a system of repression by Hungary which Seton-Watson described as “without any parallel in civilized Europe”. This book does not directly blame Seton-Watson or Wickham Steed for the outcome of Trianon (the post-WWI treaty by which Hungary was deprived of two thirds of her territory, millions of her citizens and a significant proportion of her natural resources), but it was Britain who led the charge towards the dismemberment of the Habsburg empire and it did this even before the War was over, for example by entering into treaties with Italy and Romania, enticing them over to the Allied side in return for territorial reward. Jeszenszky quotes a telegram sent in January 1915 to the British Embassy in Bucharest by the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey: “We have already declined to entertain any suggestion of Hungarian independence that would prevent satisfaction of Roumanian national aspirations as regards Transylvania.” It was a done deal. What Britain did not see was that there is no such thing as “the Slavs”. Croats, Serbs and Slovenes do not always think alike and their interests are not necessarily the same; nor are those of Czechs and Slovaks. Prophetic voices such as that of the intelligence officer Leo Amery, warning that breaking up Austria-Hungary would create a “new Balkan” of weak, unstable states which would “sooner or later lead to another war”, were ignored. 

Britain was an imperial power not known for championing the self-determination of the peoples under her dominion. How dare she, one might ask, attack Hungary on the subject of the way she treated her minorities? Wickham Steed excused himself by maintaining that his attitude was directed purely and simply by British national interest. As he saw it, a Hungary which worked in harmony with its nationalities would be a stronger ally against Germany. One that was at daggers drawn with them was a danger to Britain. Seton-Watson’s attitude was more personal. He had friends among the non-Magyars in Hungary and the horror-stories they told him led him to see everything in black and white. His Racial Problems in Hungary (1908) was shocking and convincing but it was also exaggerated and factually selective, “a passionate piece of polemical writing”. Hungary was certainly unlucky in making an enemy of him, since he was more of an activist than a historian. He orchestrated the bombardment of Austro-Hungarian troops with leaflets showing proposed new national borders and urging Slav and Romanian soldiers to desert and join international legions. Murky tactics. But Jeszenszky notes that Hungary was fooling herself in clinging to the notion that she was or could become a homogenous nation and her tendency to see all manifestations of national feeling as separatism, and thus to crush them, merely served to fan the flames.

In some ways this book is a portrait in non-fiction of the plot of Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy: a wilfully blind elite class of Magyars refusing to see how hard the people they oppress (both the national minorities and the working classes) are longing for their destruction. And Jeszenszky pulls off a rare feat: he makes parliamentary history into a page-turner. But quite a lot of background knowledge is taken for granted and readers not already familiar with Hungarian history will need to look things up, because Lost Prestige is not a history book, it is a book about image: about how Hungary was viewed and judged by external media and about how it failed to turn the mirror on itself to see how big its warts really were.

The Paris Peace Conference made many mistakes. In Central Europe, multiple peoples were living “overlapping and mixed and it was next to impossible to create States uniting all the members of a nation and having no large minorities that had their own distinct language and identity.” Human nature is universal and after Trianon, Hungarians found themselves minorities among the peoples they had tried to Magyarise. But what would have happened if Hungary had appeased its nationalities? Would concessions have prevented the break-up of the Hungarian lands? Or merely accelerated it? The opinions that become history are all about perception. Perceptions drive events. Tony Blair and the spin doctors were right: it is crucial to put the right gloss on things. 

The English translation of this book is timely. How is it that Hungary has once again alienated the world’s press, when in 1956 and 1989 it was lionised? Are we seeing a repeat of 1848 and 1914? It is always tempting to look for historical parallels. The UK’s vote to leave the EU unleashed intense confrontation between leavers and remainers. Can similarities be seen with post-Dualist Hungary? Does today’s European Union approximate to the federation of states that some early 20th-century observers believed was the solution to Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia and European equipoise?

And to what degree were Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed’s analyses fair? Reputation is a fragile thing, an “idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving” (Othello). Hungary, as Jeszenszky points out, was neither so liberal before the turn of the 20th century nor so reactionary afterwards as British commentators portrayed it. But instead of angrily blaming the mirror for distortion, he suggests, a better response is to consider instead whether some of the faults it shows might actually be there. We should take Jeszenszky’s concluding lines to heart: “Self-awareness that also rests on criticism from others is essential to individuals as well as to nations.”

Lost Prestige: Hungary’s Changing Image in Britain 1894–1918, by Géza Jeszenszky. English Translation by Brian McLean. Published by Helena History Press, 2020. Reviewed here by Annabel Barber.

Hungarian pioneer of hand-sanitization

How many of us today, while methodically washing our hands in the hope of staving off Covid-19, think of Ignác Semmelweis? How many of us have even heard of him? Semmelweis (1818–65) is not widely known around the world but he is a familiar name in Hungary. Budapest’s medical school is named after him and he has gone down in history as the ‘saviour of mothers’ because his pioneering methods saved many women and infants from death by puerperal fever. Semmelweis’ theories were revolutionary for his time. And now, his insistence on the importance of disinfection to halt the spread of contagion has been brought once again under the spotlight as we are once again reminded of its importance. Semmelweis was ahead of the curve in his grasp of the importance of hand-washing: his hunch was borne out by significant decreases in the rate of mortality on obstetric wards under his supervision. Despite this, his idea was rejected by the established medical community, who were offended by the suggestion that a patient’s death could be imputed to the medical staff’s personal hygiene. What made things more difficult for Semmelweis was the fact that he was a practitioner, not a scientist. His theory could be explained as a hunch that seemed to work but he had detected nothing through a microscope that could furnish scientific explanation and proof. He never gained the reputation he deserved during his lifetime. In fact he suffered some kind of mental and emotional breakdown and began lashing out in print at the ignorance and obstinacy of the medical fraternity. In the end he was transferred to an asylum in Vienna, a move supported by his wife, who was no longer able to cope with his tantrums. He died very shortly after his admission, perhaps as a result of ill-treatment.

Semmelweis’s former home in Budapest is now a museum of the history of medicine (described in full in Blue Guide Budapest). His theory, of course, is fully recognised today. Named after him is the phenomenon known as the Semmelweis reflex, the human tendency to reject or ridicule new ideas if they fly in the face of accepted convention.

An Artist of the World

Portrait of the artist’s wife. 1918. Private collection.

A rare treat for lovers of portraiture: a small show entirely dedicated to the work of Philip de László (1869–1937) is currently running at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest.

On the face of it, this should not seem altogether surprising. Hungarian gallery exhibits works by Hungarian artist. Not a headline-stealer, you might think. But the extraordinary thing about de László is, that this is the first exhibition devoted to his work to be mounted in his native city for almost a hundred years.

De László was the last—and for many, the finest—portraitist in the Grand Manner. His biography is a true example of life mimicking fairy-tale. Born into a humble family in inner-city Budapest, he rose to become the most sought-after portrait painter of his generation. He married an Anglo-Irish girl, Lucy Guinness, and settled permanently in England in 1907. During the course of an exceptionally successful career he painted more than 4,000 likenesses: heads of state (many of them crowned), lords temporal and spiritual, celebrated hostesses, heroes of the battlefield—and was much honoured in recognition, receiving the MVO from Edward VII and a grant of arms from Franz Joseph (to name but two of the 22 distinctions heaped upon him).

The sixteen works on display in this small show, all from de László’s mature period, represent a tiny fraction of his total output. His pace was feverish and scarcely slackened, except when he was interned as a person of ‘hostile origin’ during WWI. The portraits, both from public collections and on loan from private ones, are well chosen, a mix of the famous, the not-so-famous and the fascinating to google. Among them are Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (when Duchess of York), Cardinal Mariano Rampolla (whose path to the papacy was blocked by Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary) and General Artúr Görgei, anti-hero of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1849. But the success of a portrait need not depend on the fame of the sitter (only think of Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier). By no means all of de László’s subjects were household names, but with an artist of his skill, that is irrelevant. De László was brilliant at capturing a likeness. His portraits flatter but never falsify. The face is everything, and it is made to speak volumes. ‘Wonderfully clever,’ was Margot Asquith’s verdict on her portrait of 1901, ‘and much more interesting than I am’. This is possibly because there is so much left unsaid. Unlike, for example, Pompeo Batoni, the popular Italian portraitist of some hundred years previously, who threw suggestive contextual paraphernalia into his backgrounds (hunting dogs and fragments of Grecian urn, to anchor his subjects in their ‘milords-on-the-Grand Tour’ personas), de László rarely uses extraneous props. The result is an impression of irresistible glamour. De László may have had extraordinary powers of psychological penetration but he also got to the essence of his sitters by the simple expedient of chatting to them. Many became lifelong friends. One gets the impression that sitting for him was fun. Unlike Sargent, who ultimately disliked a lot of the people who made his reputation, Eeyore-ishly admitting that ‘Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend,’ de László’s experience and approach was entirely the opposite. He liked people. He was a showman, garrulous and energetic. A lovely touch in this exhibition is a little cine film snippet that shows him darting about his studio with quick, robin-like movements.

There is also a sense of the thrill of the chase. One of the aims of the De Laszlo Archive Trust is to complete the Catalogue Raisonné of all de László’s works, the whereabouts of many of which are still unknown. But when a lost painting does float to the surface, the excitement is palpable. At the opening night of this exhibition, four generations of one family were present in the room: the sitter and her children staring out from one of the portraits and the grand-daughter and great-grand-daughter among the assembled guests. The group portrait in question had only just come to light, in eastern Hungary. Hiding in plain sight. But de László is not well known in his native country. Partly because he left it and made his name outside. Partly because the monarchs and prelates of the age he depicted were hopelessly bad cadre under Communism. Not all of their reputations have recovered (Admiral Horthy, Mussolini, Kaiser Wilhelm II) but as de László himself insisted—in a remark which has become famous and serves as the title of this exhibition—he painted people, not politics. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the portraits of his family. The portrait of Lucy (their relationship was not without its trials but remained devoted) is an exceptionally accomplished work, using the device of the mirror to play with ideas of reality and illusion, the paradox of the viewer viewed. Perhaps this little jewel box of an exhibition does something similar in the variety of ways it displays its artist to us. De László is manifoldly manifest. These are his portraits, of course. One of them is even a self-portrait. And then there is the cine-clip. But he is present in three dimensions too, in the form of a small sculpture by Paul Troubetkzkoy. A lovely example of the limner limned.

I am an Artist of the World runs at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest until 5th January.

The Seuso Treasure: a new display

Readers of these blogposts might have noticed our interest in the Seuso Treasure. We freely admit it. After all, these fourteen pieces make up what is arguably the finest trove of late imperial Roman silver in existence. And now, in a keenly-awaited move, it has become one of the permanent galleries at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest with an impressive and spacious new display.

Since 2014, when the first seven pieces of the hoard were repatriated by the Hungarian government, we have written plenty about the silver and its convoluted history. To read about that, see here (also linked at the bottom of this article). This post will talk exclusively about the new display, which opened last week.

What is immediately striking is the solemnity. The visit begins in a long corridor, flanked by artefacts and information panels that give context and set the scene. The experience is a little like entering a processional dromos or sacred way, leading to an ancient temple or tholos tomb. At the end of the corridor is the inner sanctum, where the silver itself is displayed in a space made mysterious by plangent music. The air is thick with the silence. Custodians are keen to remind visitors not to take photographs. It is almost as if we were being inducted into an Eleusinian mystery, with the injunction never to divulge what we saw and heard when we return to the less rarefied atmosphere of our ordinary lives. Certainly not share it on Instagram!

Whereas the previous display of the silver was cramped, with the pieces crowded together, almost as if mimicking the tight packing in the copper cauldron in which they were found, the new exhibition arranges the items far apart. Those which clearly belong together (the Hippolytus situlae, for example) are displayed side by side. The others are their own islands.

And now they are joined by the famous Kőszárhegy Stand (illustrated below), an adjustable four-legged contraption, a sort of luxury camping table, made of silver of the most extreme purity, purer than sterling. It was discovered near the village of Kőszárhegy, close to the putative find-spot of the Seuso Treasure itself, in 1878, during the chopping down and digging out of a plum tree. It was in a fragmentary state: two legs were unearthed together with most of two of the crosspieces. Restorers originally assumed that it had been a tripod, and integrated it accordingly. It was only when it proved impossible to prevent persistent cracking that the Museum team realised that it needed a fourth leg to make it stable and correct the tension. Two of the legs and X-shaped crossbars that you see today are original. The other two are restorations. The challenge is to detect which are which.The Kőszárhegy Silver Stand, in the Hungarian National Museum’s booklet on the Treasure.

The stand is an extraordinary piece, well over a metre high and capable of being adjusted to hold the largest of the Seuso platters. It is thought that it could have been pressed into service in a number of ways: to hold plates laden with good things at an outdoor feast, for example; or as a washstand bearing a silver basin and water pitchers. Its marine-themed iconography would support this view. Each leg terminates in a cupid figure riding a dolphin. Halfway up each leg is a sharp-beaked aquatic gryphon. The finials are decorated with silver tritons, clutching conch shells in huge-fingered hands, with water nymphs seated on their backs, naked but for a chain around their necks and a billowing veil above their heads. One of them holds an apple, the attribute of Aphrodite. As the information panel tells us, the Roman or Romanised Celtic domina who washed her face at this stand would have been flatteringly reminded as she did so of her own uncanny resemblance to Paris’s chosen goddess.

The Kőszárhegy Silver Stand, in the Hungarian National Museum’s booklet on the Treasure.

But the wealthy elite of Roman Pannonia were not goddesses or gods. As the central scene on the famous Pelso plate shows, they were a fun-loving bunch of mortals. They enjoyed picnicking in the open air beside Lake Balaton, scoffing freshly-caught fish and washing it down with beakers of wine. They loved their dogs and gave humorous nicknames to their horses. They threw banquets to show off their silver to each other, and display their erudition when it came to Graeco-Roman mythology. The characters that Seuso—whoever he may have been—chose to depict on his tableware, as reflections of his own attributes, were the great warrior Achilles, the great huntsman Meleager and the great reveller Dionysus. The women of his household are associated with Aphrodite, the Three Graces and Phaedra the temptress. These were people in love with life and merrymaking. So why the solemn atmosphere and the doleful music? Where are the dancing girls and the Apician stuffed dormice? The title of this display is “The Splendour of Roman Pannonia”: a good one; Seuso could certainly do bling. What he and his family left behind is ineffably precious. As well as revere it, we should also enjoy it, throw ourselves a little into the mood of carefree frivolity that these gorgeous pieces evoke.

The story of the Treasure on blueguides.com

Website of the Hungarian National Museum

Hungary Food Companion

The brand new Blue Guide Hungary Food Companion is now out. A handy lexicon of Magyar food vocabulary, with a miscellany of culinary information (and a few traditional recipes) thrown into the pot alongside.

p_hungaryfood

Hungary typically has blisteringly hot summers but curiously no real summer cuisine. A cold fruit soup made from strawberry, apricot or sour cherry, followed by stuffed marrow or stuffed paprika, is about as light as it gets in the traditional repertoire. Summer is also the season for “főzelék”. As the interwar court chef Sándor Újváry noted, “It is needless to list the types of főzelék that belong to the domestic culinary repertoire and which are prepared on a daily basis in so many kitchens: they are all universally known…and the perfect preparation of these well-known types of főzelék requires little effort and few ingredients.”

Sounds good. But what is a főzelék? The name roughly means a boil-up, which is essentially accurate: a főzelék is a dish of boiled vegetable, sometimes puréed and sometimes not, mixed with a roux and eaten with a spoon. Almost any vegetable can be used, from the humble potato (krumpli) to the more highly prized asparagus (spárga). On menus, you will commonly find cabbage (káposzta) főzelék, spinach (spenót) főzelék, pumpkin (tök) főzelék, green pea (zöldborsó) főzelék. In the market this morning we found yellow string beans (vajbab). So yellow string bean főzelék it was to be.

Here they are in their raw state:

And this is the recipe we followed to turn them into főzelék.

1. Wash and chop the beans, into sections roughly 2–3cm long. Cook them until tender in lightly salted water (we had some leftover chicken stock, so we used that instead).

2. Prepare the roux. With a wire whisk, combine flour and sour cream and powdered paprika. We used three heaped teaspoons of flour, one heaped teaspoon of paprika and two tablespoons of sour cream.

3. Drain the beans, retaining the water. Then gradually add the water to the roux, mixing all the while.

4. Put the mixture on a low heat, stirring until it thickens. Add the beans. Salt to taste if necessary. Serve.

This is what it looked like.

Simple but delicious.