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Silas Crockett by Mary Ellen ChaseReview by: Herschel BrickellThe North American Review, Vol. 241, No. 1 (Mar., 1936), pp. 153-155Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114710 .

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BOOK REVIEWS [ 153 ]

SILAS CROCKETT. By Mary Ellen Chase. Macmillan, $2.50.

THE

notable efflorescence of regional literature in Maine

during the past five years is one of the most striking literary phenomena of the times, and constitutes a significant phase of the whole movement in this country toward the study and evaluation of the American past. In its more romantic and sentimental aspects, the trend may perhaps be explained as an extreme unrest in the present, and an attempt to swing the

mind backward into happier days; but the best writing it has

produced is of more lasting importance than it could be, if it were merely embodied nostalgia.

Certain of the regional writers, among them Mary Ellen

Chase, are not so much filled with a yearning for another time ? the Golden Age that has always fired the fancy of mankind ? as they are concerned with the survival of fine and lasting

traits of character that have come down to us as first-hand evi dence that not quite all we know about the past lies in the realm of the imagination. In other words, they are writing in

spirational literature ? translating into human terms the

spiritual content of the past, and are showing us how strangely and how strongly, good qualities survive from one age to an

other, even though they may seem at times to be lost through a

general sense of changing values.

Every effort that is made to recapture the past is looked

upon by the superficial as no more than an attempt to evade the present. This is particularly true when a new literary

movement springs into being ? such as the rise of the pro

letarian cult in fiction in this country, which has taken place alongside the regionalistic delving into our past, and which is

essentially contemporary, because most of its followers either

disregard history or reduce it so completely to economics that its lessons are worth nothing in any other field. Novelists like

Miss Chase are fundamentally for people who believe in the

changeless things of the spirit. She began her contribution to the reconstruction of Maine

history with an autobiography, "The Goodly Heritage," which was almost a novel in form, although its incidents were

all taken from life. The title was significant, and will serve, I

suspect, as a sort of general title for all her work. At least it

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C 154 ] THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

might easily take in her first novel, "Mary Peters" and her

second, "Silas Crockett." The first was a full-length study of a

woman, a chronicle in which the emphasis was upon charac

ter, the strength to face up to whatever trials life may bring. The second has a similar theme with a considerably more

varied cast of characters and background. In fact, as "The Goodly Heritage" was the history of a

Maine woman's life from infancy to the middle years, and

"Mary Peters" the equally vivid, equally fine and penetrating

history of another Maine woman, "Silas Crockett" is the his

tory of a family through four generations, or, to put it another

way, the history of Saturday Cove over a period of a hundred

years, from 1830 to the present. It is, therefore, a chronicle

novel, in which Time supplies the forward motion, and in

which the emphasis, as Miss Chase says in her brief foreword, is "purposely placed more upon setting and character than

upon plot and incident. The strength and appeal of the

chronicle novel depend upon the successful re-creation of the

past, its re-vivification, and at this Miss Chase, quite obviously without taking any liberties, exhibits notable skill.

Men readers will find her discussing ships in full detail, and if it is not ships they happen to love, but houses, writing of one

of those marvelous early American artisans as if she had known

and talked to him. Women will find that there is nothing missing from her description of a wedding feast ? what

valiant trenchermen those ancestors of ours were! ? and fully informed about all the changes in styles from one period to

another. It is not difficult to guess the amount of loving re

search that has gone into such a novel as "Silas Crockett."

But there are no museum trappings in the novel ? only the

settings for understandable, real people, able to reach out and

touch lives with ours.

It was Thomas Winship, father of the Solace whom Silas

Crockett married and took to sea, who built both ships and

houses. A ship's carpenter who had traveled the seven seas, he came home to put all the good architecture he had seen into

his meeting houses. About one of these Miss Chase writes:

In it Sir Christopher Wren lived again, Samuel Mclntyre, Charles Bulfinch, and other builders now nameless, whose homes and churches and public buildings Thomas Winship

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BOOK REVIEWS [ 155 ] had studied with an eye to shrewd and reverent emulation. For the New England meeting-house in its best and noblest form is an

incorporation, a unification, a synthesis of the art and the

architecture of many centuries, many lands and many peoples.

The four panels which make up Miss Chase's historical screen of one century are the lives of Silas Crockett, his son

Nicholas, his grandson Reuben, and his great-grandson Silas

Crockett II. Silas the first came along in the opulent 'thirties

and lived on into the even more opulent 'forties when money was easy for men who could sail ships. Nicholas went to sea, but lost his life when he had to become a fisherman to support his family. The best Reuben could do was to find a job on a

coastwise steamer, the Searsport, and, when she was finally laid up, on a ferryboat. There was no more sea for Silas II, and we leave him working in a herring factory.

In other hands this downhill course of a family might have come out as a study of degeneracy, but as I have already said

Miss Chase is showing us people who do not yield to change and misfortune. And behind each of the men is a woman fit to

be his mate, from the lovely Solace Winship, who married

Silas I, to the brave and modern Ann, whom we leave ready to marry Silas II.

Miss Chase is too intelligent to write a sentimental line; it is

merely that she knows, which some other novelists do not, that

there are, and always have been, good and strong people, and

that they are worth writing about. If there were not these de

voted and instinctive fighters of chaos, we should have gone under long ago, and it is worth while to spend time in the

company of as many of them as we can come to know in life or

fiction. HERSCHEL BRICKELL

RED SKY IN THE MORNING. By Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Macmillan, $2.50.

DOWN

in Maine, winters are long and bitter hard, and summers are as brief as opportunity; and the folk who

dwell there have perforce learned to live warily and frugally,

following proved and tested ways, avoiding experiment and waste and every folly. To survive, it has been necessary for

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