In 1884, as Matthew Arnold was engaged on a lecture tour of America, the English Illustrated Magazine published an essay on the critic and poet by the expatriate American Henry James. A previous estimation of Arnold by James, one of his earliest published pieces (1865), showed him arriving at an acute understanding of Arnold's conception of criticism. There James had written: ‘We said just now that its duty was, among other things, to exalt, if possible, the importance of the ideal. We should perhaps have said the intellectual; that is, of the principle of understanding things’ (EAE, 717). Choosing not to follow his first impulse to assign criticism to an ideal realm, James instead approves of Arnold's insistence on making it serve the everyday world of living. For Arnold, James declares, the world is not simply a given; in order to make sense of it we need to engage in a ‘labour’ of interpretation. In his 1884 judgement James characterised Arnoldian criticism as the bridging of historical and cultural gaps – an essential service (and one he felt to be particularly necessary in America), for if the human mind has difficulty in understanding its own culture, so much greater are its problems when faced with those of others. James posits the situation of a foreigner confronted with a world he does not know.