The movement of Arnold's thought over the twenty years that followed Dover Beach is from the dismay and nihilism of the loss of faith to the inner call of ‘conduct’ and ‘righteousness’, the pivotal concepts of Literature and Dogma, published in 1873. Their distance from clear consciousness and presumably therefore from expression in the earlier phase determines the famous melancholy, which I suggest is the discontented voice of their insistence. As he says in The Buried Life,

This is the authentic language of an attention drowsily but desperately turning to what lies only at the periphery (or here, below the surface) of thought and volition. It is daunting, to become biographical, and sobering, that the twenty years we are talking about are the years which have been thought to have destroyed his poetry, the years as a Schools Inspector.

It is only through a long and quickened discipline of attention that what presents itself at first as ‘vague and forlorn’ etc., is going to enter forcefully into clear consciousness, thence through action into life. In Dover Beach, ‘the eternal note of sadness’ is not a consequence of the loss of faith: its sound is present even when the tide is full.