It is very difficult to give any clear picture of the atmosphere of the town between Revolution week and this Easter Eve, and yet all the seeds of the later crop of horrors were sewn during that period.  Its spiritual mentality corresponded almost exactly with the physical thaw that accompanied it—­mist, then vapour dripping of rain, the fading away of one clear world into another that was indistinct, ghostly, ominous.  I find written in my Diary of Easter Day—­exactly five weeks after the outbreak of the Revolution—­these words:  “From long talks with K. and others I see quite clearly that Russians have gone mad for the time being.  It’s heartbreaking to see them holding meetings everywhere, arguing at every street corner as to how they intend to arrange a democratic peace for Europe, when meanwhile the Germans are gathering every moment force upon the frontiers.”

Pretty quick, isn’t it, to change from Utopia to threatenings of the worst sort of Communism?  But the great point for us in all this—­the great point for our private personal histories as well as the public one—­was that it was during these weeks that the real gulf between Russia and the Western world showed itself!  Yes, for more than three years we had been pretending that a week’s sentiment and a hurriedly proclaimed Idealism could bridge a separation which centuries of magic and blood and bones had gone to build.  For three years we tricked ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived) ... but we liked the ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of sentimentality), we liked the theory of inexhaustible numbers, we liked the picture of their pounding, steam-roller like, to Berlin... we tricked ourselves, and in the space of a night our trick was exposed.

Plain enough the reasons for these mistakes that we in England have made over that same Revolution, mistakes made by none more emphatically than by our own Social Democrats.  Those who hailed the Revolution as the fulfilment of all their dearest hopes, those who cursed it as the beginning of the damnation of the world—­all equally in the wrong.  The Revolution had no thought for them.  Russian extremists might shout as they pleased about their leading the fight for the democracies of the world—­they never even began to understand the other democracies.  Whatever Russia may do, through repercussion, for the rest of the world, she remains finally alone—­isolated in her Government, in her ideals, in her ambitions, in her abnegations.  For a moment the world-politics of her foreign rulers seemed to draw her into the Western whirlpool.  For a moment only she remained there.  She has slipped back again behind her veil of mist and shadow.  We may trade with her, plunge into her politics, steal from her Art, emphasise her religion—­she remains alone, apart, mysterious....