'But no man likes to be merely used as you show that you use him.'
'I pay him. I have made him the fashion. I can unmake him.'
Othmar ventured to demur to that.
'You can do a great deal in faisant la pluie et le beau temps, we all know; but surely the fashion which Loswa has attained (for it is fashion and not fame) is, though a great deal of it may be owing to full artificial support, yet real enough to stand alone. For his own generation, at any rate.'
'My dear Otho, nothing is ever easier than to dénigrer: Pope has said it before us. It costs an immense quantity of time and trouble to make a reputation, but to unmake it is as easy as to unravel wool. A word will do. If I were to hint that Loswa is a little loud in his colour, a little crude or voulu in his treatment, everyone would begin to find his talent vulgar. I shall not say it, because I shall not think it; he is an incomparable artist in his own way; but he always knows that I can say it, and that knowledge keeps him my slave.'
Othmar was silent: he did not like Loswa, and was impatient of his familiarity at Amyôt, a familiarity made more offensive to him by its mixture with flattering docility. That Loswa had a talent so masterly that it was nearly genius he quite admitted, but the quality of the talent was artificial, and seemed to him to represent the moral fibre of the artist's character.
'All Russians of a certain class are artificial,' said his wife to him when he said this. 'We are all stove plants—children of a forced culture and an unreal atmosphere. In our natural instincts we are cruel, fierce, fickle, Slav toto corde. In our social relations we are the most polished of all people. As children we bite like little wolves; grown-up we know more perfectly than anyone else how to caress our enemies. Loswa is only like us all.'
'The future of the world is with Russia?'
'I think so. All the science of history makes one sure of it: but at the present instant we are the oddest union of the most absolute barbarism and the most polished civilisation that the world holds. Society has nothing so perfectly cultured as the Russian patrician; Europe has nothing so barbarously ignorant and besotted as the Russian peasant. "Les extrêmes se touchent" more startlingly in Russia than in any other country, and out of those conflicting elements will come the dominant race of the future, as you say.'
Othmar looked at her, then said after a pause: 'I have always wondered that you have not cared to become a great political leader; all political questions interest you, and nothing else does.'