BOOK NOTICE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2669, 10 May 1905, Page 79

BOOK NOTICE.

"A Pagan's Love." By Constance Clyde. London : T. Fisher Unwin. (The First

Novel Library; cloth, Bvo. ; 65.)

The norn de plume of Constance Clyde is familiar to all readers of the Otago Daily Times and Witness, to which papers this lady has been a contributor for some time; and we doubt not that those readers, no less than ourselves, will now congratulate her on the acceptance by Mr Fisher TJnwin of her story " A Pagan's Love," which will immediately find a place in the " First Novel Library." The advance sheets of the story are now before us, and claim our earnest attention. The merits are great. The tale is powerfully written, the plot is original and unhackneyed, many of the situations are strong, and the characters attractive and well drawn ; it is not too long, and the interest never palls. But there is a slight lack of artistic unity, and of the steady workingup to a climax, which shows a practised hand and keeps the reader's interest suspended to the very last page. Yet Miss Clyde's method is not without charm, and we would defy even a practised novelreader to sa^r how her story is going to end. " A Pagan's Love " must be classed under the head of a sex novel, though the £ex question is not unduly paraded. The writer makes out a good case, and brings forward a strong . indictment ; but, like many other would-be reformers, she proposes no remedy, nor any workable solution to the problem, since the method taken by Ascot Wingfield would scarcely answer in ordinary practice. It is easy to draw attention to wounds and festering sores in the l>ody politic. There is no doubt a number of half-educated, halfvitalised, half -occupied women like the " maidens of Waihoa," whose fate might well engage the attention of their more fortunate sisters ; but to provide each one of these ladies with a suitable husband would be a task which even the most paternal Government would scarcely dare to undertake. Miss Clyde's opinion is that " emotion of some sort must claim woman for a time, before intellect can have its happier day " ; that the " divorce between the head and the heart " is as unnecessary as it is cruel ; and that '' mental loneliness is perhaps as trying to the woman as spiritual reverie is all but impossible to the man." She writes as a woman, and a woman of much feeling and sympathy ; and by such the sex problem cannot be ignored. She, however, touches it with considerable delicacy and intuition, and she lets in a little light on a very difficult subject, especially when that subject is further complicated by the long heredity which, lying behind every woman, makes her the sum of '" an army of grandmothers and great-grandmothers," who fight for their kinswoman and make certain thoughts and actions impossible to her ; so that the " pagan " lover, on his side, has to fight not merely " one little 20-year-old girl, but a whole host of inherited conventionalities/ The scene of the story oscillates between Otago and Sydney. The authoress does not appear to like New Zealand, and has a good many sarcastic things to say anent its climates and customs ; but of Sydney she speaks with enthusiasm and deep affection, dwelling frequently on " the warm Australian skies and the atmosphere perpetually quivering to some secret melody of love." Dorothea Wylding, the heroine, is a native-born New Zealander, n ho, driven from her home by stress of circumstance, goes to Sydney as waitress in a tea room. Here she has many adventures, more or less concerned with "" The Pagan," who is married and a " grass- widower." Dorothea, as already hinted, is ' protected by her heredity, for " a man may overcome one woman) but hardly whole generations of women." At last, when the girl has made up her mind to resist no more, her lover is burnt to death before her eyes in a street fire. This is really the climax of the story, and the remaining chapters, in which Dorothea returns to Waihoa and marries a man that she does not love, in order that she may have a child to remind her of her " pagan," are pathetic, but not artistic. This child also dies in a sudden, swift accident, and Dorothea, the woman, is left to pick up the strands of her broken life, and make the best that she can of it, side by side with the husband, who has a large enough heart to forgive what he can only partially understand. As a relief to the highly wrought pathos of her heroine's story, Miss Clyde presents us with the character of Ascot Wingfield, a ■brilliant, sparkling Australian journalist, who does not take life too seriously, but acts on her own advice to Dorothea : — " Never take a man seriously, and never permit him to take you otherwise. Keep your head on your shoulders — it's bound to rest on someone else's occasionally ; still, keep it mostly on your own. Drive out one love affair .with another/ etc.