Whittier’s Critical Creed 39
things below” (“Dedication”). He saw the aesthetic failings
of the Puritan founders and, yet, excused them because “they
lived a truer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote” (Works, V,
363). Such a moral concept of beauty had Uttle connection
with poetic fancy and imagination, while his critical pieces
put a similar emphasis on morality and especially praised
those who agreed with the abolitionist position. Art in the
pure sense was anathema for the militant reformer, for it
“builds on sand” (“Wordsworth”). Despite these unimagina-
tive and stifling tenets Whittier still wrote ballads and genre
pieces which minimized moralistic content. But his aboli-
tionist conscience had to justify even these and so he stated
in the introduction to “Amy Wentworth” that the soft play
of art, songs, and pictures have their function in soothing the
reformer’s “storm-stunned” mind and providing temporary
relief from “the sharp strifes and sorrows of today.” Art
viewed as an escape from his editorial pressures and political
activities was far removed from his early desire to find in it a
source of pure unfading joy. After the Civil War Whittier
tempered his austere denunciation of iron-moralistic art
and admitted that it “beguiled some heavy hours and called
/ Some pleasant memories up” (“The Bay of Seven Islands”),
but still it seemed of secondary value and even questionable
worth.
Whittier’s fullest statement on the function of art in gen-
eral came in The Tent on the Beach (1867). Here he pre-
sented his final view, a minor reconciliation between the doc-
trine of art for its own sake and an art which only serves
moral ends. He admits that his poetry has been too moralistic
and that his ethical conscience has thwarted fancy’s imagi-
native flight; yet, when one of the speakers in the poem