She is a woman of conventions and proprieties; her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees "This is genteel," or "This is improper," written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose. This is not Christopher Newman; this is no American self-made man talking; it is Henry James himself. Did he realize his mistake when his art was more mature and his judgment more ripe? Collate the changes which he made thirty years later for the final edition of _The American_. Newman is asked, for instance, if he is visiting Europe for the first time. According to the earlier version he replies, "Very much so"; according to the latest version, "Quite immensely the first." Is more proof needed? All his average Americans--Daisy Miller, Henrietta Stackpole, Casper Goodwood, and the others, fall short in the same way. Objectively they are true to life. As a painter of external portraits, as a depicter of tricks of personality, of manners, of all that makes up a perfect external likeness, James is surpassed not even by Howells; but he fails to reach the springs of life. Howells's Silas Lapham is a living personality; James's Christopher Newman is a lay figure in Yankee costume. For James knows Americans chiefly as he has studied them in pensions and hotels along the grand tour. He has not been introduced to them, he has simply watched them--their uneasiness in their new element, their attempts at adjustment, their odd little mistakes; he hears them talk at the tables around him--their ejaculations, their wonder, their enthusiasm, and he jots it all down. He has no sympathy, he has no feeling, he has no object, save the scientific desire to record phenomena. This material he weaves into novels--stories, but not stories told with narrative intent, not stories for entertainment or wonder or sensation. The story is a clinic, a dissection, a psychological seminar. _What Maisie Knew_ is an addition to the literature of child study. It is as if he had set himself to observe case after case for his brother, William James, to use as materials for psychological generalizations and a final treatise. The data are often inaccurate because of the observer's personal equation; it does not always conform with the results of our own observing--we wonder, for instance, if he is as far afield in his pictures of the European aristocracy as in those of his average Americans--yet the process is always the same.