It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything different from that which he has done.  Without being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both.  But I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold’s fate at this moment I should have arranged it differently.  He should have given us more poems—­the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack.  And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey’s or as Sainte-Beuve’s own, and more than Hazlitt’s, of the kind of the Heine and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the Byron later.  I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years’ lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,—­there are more than enough subjects in the various literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, it is not likely.  To complete the thing, I should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted.  But Dis aliter visum:  at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did not interfere.

We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work.  His tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which it might have laid on his own lips.  A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the “leap in the dark” of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad.  He at least thought—­and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking—­that intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were coming or come upon the world.  And so for a time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves.  Social, political, and religious matters tempted him away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume.