n in which he lives. And the true realism,
always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."

"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]

[D] 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the
Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss
the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each
one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems
as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only
by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness
toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we
inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some
pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common
practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a
gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the
vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer
seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary
values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests
fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce:--

"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his
feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him
is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to
thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is
a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... So, dimly and by instinct
hast thou lived with thy neig