INTRODUCTION
BY VIOLENCE
II
III
IV
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
THE CHRISTENING OF THE FIFTEEN PRINCESSES
For eight years or more, since I first became acquainted with the novelsand tales of John Trevena it has been my firm conviction that onlyThomas Hardy and George Moore among contemporary novelists rival his artat its best. Like Meredith, he has written for twenty years inobscurity, and like Meredith also he has been content with a smalldiscriminating audience. I suppose that in 1950 our grandchildren willbe electing college courses on his literary method, but meanwhile itwould be more gratifying if there were even a slight public response tothe quality of his individual talent.
Trevena's novels are the expression of a passionate feeling for Nature,regarded as the sum of human personality and experience, in all itsmoods,—benign and malign, as man is benign and malign, and faithful tolife in the stone as well as the flower. What a gallery of memorablecharacters they are, Mary and Peter Tavy, Brightly, Cuthbert Orton,Jasper Ramrige, Anthonie and Petronel, William and Yellow Leaf, CaptainDrake and dark Pendoggat, Ann Code, Cyril Rossingall, and a hundredothers, passionate and gentle, with wind and water and earth and sky fora chorus, and the shifting pageantry of Nature as a stage.
His fourteen volumes reveal a gift for characterization equalled by noneof the contemporary English realists, and a Shakespearian humorelsewhere gone from our day. In Furze the Cruel, Bracken, WinteringHay, and Sleeping Waters, to name no others, John Trevena has writtennovels of Dartmoor that will take their rightful place in the greatEnglish line, when the honest carpentering of Phillpotts that nowovershadows them is totally forgotten.
The feeling has spread among Trevena's few critical American admirerswho have written about him, that he is fundamentally morbid andone-sided. On the contrary, I know of few novelists who are morerecklessly and irresistibly gay, in whom sheer fun bubbles over sospontaneously and wholeheartedly. To ignore life's harshness is simplyto ignore life. Trevena's many-sidedness will be apparent only whenthere is a definitive edition of his work. His habit of confining anovel to a single mood or passion of nature, together with the fact thatAmericans have only had an opportunity to read those novels by him whichdeal with nature's most cruel moods, have done the reputation of Trevenaa grave injustice.
By Violence and Matrimony are Trevena's most beautiful short tales,and I hardly know which is the finer revelation of poetic grace andgentle vision. Their message is conveyed so quietly that they may beread for their sensuous beauty only, and yet convey a rare pleasure. Iftheir feeling is veiled and somewhat aloof from the common ways of men,there is none the less a fine human sympathy concealed in them, and agolden radiance indissolubly woven into their pa