Lured away from their native and more primitive environment by art, mysticism and culture, there is not enough real red blood in James’ American maidens to follow the call to the last. They soon find themselves waylaid and they stop midway. Several of them do not survive their disillusions. They die of despair before reaching the mystic Grail (the “golden bowl”) unless they are rescued _in extremis_ by some “ambassadors” from the “land of God.” Soul-fear and floating anxiety paralyzed their wings. And yet, how ardent and eager they are to discover the world in an intimate relation to themselves! They take the soul of the adventurers and the pioneers to the conquest of intuition. They would fain clasp to their bosom all that is beautiful in the world, if their Puritan consciences allowed. The art galleries, the romantic landscapes, the ancient monuments, the old churches are their familiar hunting ground. How they clutch at spiritual adventures! Their passion for sentimental expansion, their craving for introspection, know no limits. As Milly Theale exclaims in “The Wings of the Dove,” they want to be _abysmal_. They want “something to find out,” something which calls for “the vigil of searching criticism” through many and many hundred pages. There is something morbid in this bend toward self-analysis and always thinking of one’s self. Henry James even took children to that school of unlimited moral curiosity. “What Maisie Knew” is a wonderful and almost frightful example of instinctive detection of grown-up passions by a child. When all is said, the case of Henry James had much to do with psychological duplicity. His novels were a first-hand contribution to the study of inhibitions. As has been justly remarked, the main object of his books was “emotional starvation.” His psychology revolved around “the Puritan blindness of the senses or the atrophy of emotions.” James himself “wrote his fiction under heavy inhibitions, the result both of personal shyness and of the peculiar timidity of his race and day.” His chief object in writing novels was to denounce “the undervitality of Americans.”[14]