"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding--and so
on.... Sweet lovers love the spring.... Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of
each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in
working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his
philosophical _magnum opus_--"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study
of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative
essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to
be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my
fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy;
and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers
it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the
more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our
enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I
supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my
detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded
it--our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with
a _cliche_-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned
gas....