guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and
narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty,
courage, and unwavering faith--religious faith in the Marxian gospel,
which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise,
except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty
as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when
they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with
whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot
but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world. I went to
Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has
intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in
itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its
sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Trotsky, whom the Communists do not by any means regard as Lenin's
equal, made more impression upon me from the point of view of
intelligence and personality, though not of character. I saw too
little of him, however, to have more than a very superficial
impression. He has bright eyes, military bearing, lightning
intelligence and magnetic personality. He is very good-looking, with
admirable wavy hair; one feels he would be irresistible to women. I
felt in him a vein of gay good humour, so long as he was not crossed
in any way. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that his vanity was even
greater than his love of power--the sort of vanity that one associates
with an artist or actor. The comparison with Napoleon was forced upon
one. But I had no means of estimating the strength of his Communist
conviction, which may be very sincere and profound.

An extraordinary contrast to both these men was Gorky, with whom I had
a brief interview in Petrograd. He was in bed, apparently very ill and