The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war, having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness; knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful; they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much more for themselves as they could. No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all the people for whom existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines, steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life--the thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down from its picture and walk the earth--or vice versa, since I do not in the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great, incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were indeed an account of life in another element.