THE NOBLEMAN'S PARADISE 189
dependants. 'The cattle live like people', he wrote, 'and the common people like
cattle.'
The charge against the szlachta therefore is that their social relationships
were both sentimental and vicious at one and the same time; that their outlook
towards the other estates was characterized by a contradictory mixture of real
concern and cruel contempt; that they loved their serfs, and flogged them. It is a
nice paradox. Class analysis suggests that whilst the floggings were real, the love
was a sham. A glimpse at human nature suggests otherwise. Love and Hate are
frequent companions. They represent opposite extremes of the same emotional
response to the bonds of mutual dependence. They appear together in the expe-
riences of marriage partners, and of parents and children, and in the life of most
known institutions. They are strongest when prevailing circumstances preclude
any easy means of escape. It is not at all surprising that they should appear
together in the everyday life of a rigid, unchanging society.
Throughout these centuries, the real enemy was apathy. In a system where the
Golden Freedom forced no one into civic responsibilities, it was all too easy for
noblemen to cultivate their estates and to revel in their petty, private concerns.
Social reform was as impossible to introduce as absolute government. The most a
sensitive man could do was to reflect on the discrepancy between the world around
him and the Christian religion which almost all professed, and to pour cold water
on the idyllic fantasies which so many cherished. When remonstrations ran dry,
the satirists invited the nobility to chuckle, and by chuckling, to awake to their true
condition. The Arian, Wactaw Potocki, added a note of truly apocalyptic irony:
The world sleeps, besotted with wine, and dims its eyes,
Whilst the Babylonian whore fills up the glass, and the Devil
conspires.
The world, for all its abominations, sleeps like a dead tree,
Made drunk with wine from the press of God's fury.
The Devil stands at his post, so that no one awakes,
Warning with his finger from afar; he even drugs the dogs,
Having first set drink before them in a great bowl
To make them sleep; lest any in the temple should howl,
Even with uncomprehending voice. If one so much
As turns its greedy snout, he throws it crusts of bread.
Whoever should shout aloud, like the Hound in the Wood,
Is a heretic, to be walled up for life in a cloister,
Or beheaded, or burned at the stake. What? Disturb the world's
Lovely dream? Let him test his jaws on the executioner!
Others sing with the Sirens, and sweetly play their harps
So that the world should sleep more soundly - and he barks!^37The life-style of twenty generations cannot be described in a thumb-nail sketch.
It is one thing to quote the Memoirs of figures like Jan Chrystostom Pasek or to