



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org








BY VIOLENCE

By

JOHN TREVENA

Author of "Bracken", "Sleeping Waters", etc.


With an Introduction by

EDWARD O'BRIEN


BOSTON

THE FOUR SEES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

1918




INTRODUCTION


For eight years or more, since I first became acquainted with the novels
and tales of John Trevena it has been my firm conviction that only
Thomas Hardy and George Moore among contemporary novelists rival his art
at its best. Like Meredith, he has written for twenty years in
obscurity, and like Meredith also he has been content with a small
discriminating audience. I suppose that in 1950 our grandchildren will
be electing college courses on his literary method, but meanwhile it
would be more gratifying if there were even a slight public response to
the 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 its
moods,--benign and malign, as man is benign and malign, and faithful to
life in the stone as well as the flower. What a gallery of memorable
characters they are, Mary and Peter Tavy, Brightly, Cuthbert Orton,
Jasper Ramrige, Anthonie and Petronel, William and Yellow Leaf, Captain
Drake and dark Pendoggat, Ann Code, Cyril Rossingall, and a hundred
others, passionate and gentle, with wind and water and earth and sky for
a chorus, and the shifting pageantry of Nature as a stage.

His fourteen volumes reveal a gift for characterization equalled by none
of the contemporary English realists, and a Shakespearian humor
elsewhere gone from our day