‘And I do not like your calling Matthew Arnold Mr Kidglove Cocksure. I have more reason than you for disagreeing with him and thinking him very wrong, but nevertheless I am sure he is a rare genius and a great critic.’

The note of animus that Hopkins here rebukes in Bridges is a familiar one where Arnold is concerned: it characterizes a large part of recorded comment on him. Raleigh's essay in Some Authors is (if we can grant this very representative litterateur so much distinction) a convenient locus classicus for it and for the kind of critical injustice it goes with. But one may be quite free from such animus or from any temptation to it—may welcome rather than resent that in Arnold by which the Raleighs are most antagonized—and yet find critical justice towards him oddly difficult to arrive at. He seems to present to the appraising reader a peculiarly elusive quantity. At least, that is my experience as an admirer, and I am encouraged in generalizing by the fact that the experience of the most important literary critic of our time appears to have been much the same.

In The Sacred Wood, speaking of Arnold with great respect, Mr Eliot calls him ‘rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic’, and I must confess that for years the formula seemed to me unquestionably just. Is Arnold's critical achievement after all a very impressive one? His weaknesses and his irritating tricks one remembers very well.