CHAPTER V.

THE LAST DECADE.

It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical to assume, that in the change or reversion noted at the end of the last chapter, Mr Arnold had any consciousness of relinquishment, still more to hint any definite sense of failure on his part.  He would probably have said (if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, and he had condescended to reply) that he had said his say, had shot his bolt, and might leave them to produce their effect.  But that there was, if no repentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe.  He must have seen—­he almost acknowledges that he saw—­that the work which he at least thought was conservative was being utilised by others in a purely destructive spirit; he must have found himself in very unwelcome alliances; and (which is worst of all to a delicate and sensitive spirit) he must constantly have found fools dotting his i’s and emphasising his innuendoes in their own clumsy and Philistine fashion.  At any rate, it is purely historical to say that he did henceforward almost entirely change his main line of operation as to religious matters, and that though, as has been shown, he persisted, not too fortunately, in politics, his method of discussion in that likewise was altered.  As we heard no more of the three Lord Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society were permitted to remain unchronicled.  In the latter department seriousness came upon Mr Arnold; in the former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly most welcome silence.

Most welcome:  for he was voiceful enough on other and his proper subjects.  “Falkland,” which followed “A French Critic on Milton,” in March in the Fortnightly, and “George Sand,” which followed it, as has been said, in June in the Nineteenth Century, somewhat deserved the title (Mixed Essays) of the volume in which they were two years later reprinted.  But the last essay of the year 1877, that on Mr Stopford Brooke’s Primer, was, like the “French Critic,” and even more than that, pure literature.  “A French Critic on Goethe,” which appeared in the Quarterly Review for January 1878, followed next.  The other pieces of this year, which also, with one exception, appeared in Mixed Essays, were, with that exception, evidences of a slight but venial relapse, or let us say of convalescence not yet quite turned into health.  “Equality” (Fortnightly, March 1878), “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism” (Fortnightly, July 1878), and “Porro Unum est Necessarium” (Fortnightly, November 1878), were, if not of “the utmost last provincial band,” yet not of the pure Quirites, the genuine citizens of the sacred city of Mr Arnold’s thought:  and he seceded from this latter in not a few of those estimable but unimportant Irish essays which have been noticed in the last chapter.