“For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit.  It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology....  It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy....  In such a case the poetry runs underground.  The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad.  For to look at the man is but to court deception.  We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales.  And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven 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:—­