NEW NOVELS .sx BROOME STAGES .sx It may well seem impossible , after the novel has flourished in its present form for just upon two hundred years , that anything new could be done with it .sx Yet in BROOME STAGES ( Heinemann , 8s .sx 6d .sx net ) Miss Clemence Dane can be congratulated in the first place upon her originality .sx She has taken the story of a family and traced it in detail through seven generations , not according to the method of the Forsyte Saga but so deftly contriving her narrative that all her plots and histories are but the elaborations of a single , embracing story .sx The great theatrical family of the Broomes sprang from Richard Broome , who may have had a drop of Stuart blood in him and whose acquaintance as a boy we make , appropriately enough , perhaps , in the year 1715 .sx This was the year that he fell in with a company of barnstormers in the old style , was smitten with a passion for the stage , came to Town , presently went into management , became the owner of the Gloriana Theatre , to be known later as the " Glory Hole , " begot by his first marriage a daughter , Hilaret , who married the Duke of Bedenham , and by his second a son , Robert , who succeeded to his father's property and inherited his gifts .sx After him came William , who married his cousin Lettice , a daughter of Hilaret ; and by the beginning of the last century we find their son Henry in possession of three theatres , the Genista and the New Broome having been added to the " Glory Hole , " and a man of wealth , position and honour .sx Yet by this we are but half-way through our immense volume ; for as we move onward in time the story becomes richer in detail , and the affairs of Henry and his two brothers Russel and Robin , of his nephew - Robin's son , Stephen - and his daughter Domina , of her son Edmund and , again , of Edmund's romantic marriage with Elinor Dale and their four sons , Richard , Henry , Gerry and John , contain enough material for three ordinary books .sx Indeed , to essay anything like a close synopsis even of one life among half a dozen that have more particularly engaged our attention would need a review of extravagant length .sx Looking back , we can pick out of the pattern various lives that have impressed the imagination with the vividness of their particular romance and development , recall innumerable incidents , " tell stories of the Broomes right back to Queen Anne , " as the youngest of them all says on the seven hundred and third page ; but the essential thing is that all this immense elaboration is but the detail of a single story , which is told with an accumulating force of interest .sx And the theme of it is the Broome character , touched and altered here and there by the other dominant strain , that of the Wyfields , introduced in the first place by Richard's daughter , Hilaret .sx They are different one from another all these Broomes , and certain personalities stand out very clearly from the crowd ; but all of them that count in this connexion exhibit in some form or another the passion for the stage and the temperament of the actor .sx And as Henry of the fourth generation says , " We of the stage are a people set apart .sx The world comes to us to see itself , but we do not go out into the world to see ourselves " - a comment capped by his daughter Domina some fifty pages later , when she tells her son Edmund that " we all of us do everything to excess .sx " That is the point , indeed , at which a reviewer may find grounds for criticism .sx Is not the very vividness of the impression created due to the fact that the characters of " Broome Stages " are not quite true to the psychology of human humanity ?sx Are they not all recognizably somewhat too romantic , drawn something larger than life size ?sx But Miss Dane has disarmed the criticism by her own acknowledgments ; for she has quite candidly set out to tell us the story not of such a family as we may meet every day but of one that had the theatre in its blood and did everything to excess .sx Moreover , it would be ungrateful to find fault with such an unusual and charming book , told as it is with an unfailing spirit , a keen wit and an unusual gift of language .sx THE BLANKET OF THE DARK .sx Faith and Reason , for once cooperating in the persons of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Shaw , fell on Bohun and left him for dead ; but Bohun has been renunciated by Romance in the person of Mr. John Buchan .sx One is tempted to amplify the moral and say that the triumph of Romance is the subject of THE BLANKET OF THE DARK ( Hodder and Stoughton , 7s .sx 6d .sx net ) , for it is not easy to be more definite .sx The publishers must be in the dark , too ; for one turns for elucidation to the wrapper and finds nothing ; and as a rule wrappers are so communicative .sx As the scene is the Forest of Wychwood and the neighbourhood of Oxford and the chief person a scholar , it seemed for a time that Mr. Buchan was writing his version of the Scholar-Gipsy ; but on the very last page he goes out of his way to say of his Bohuns that " nothing annoyed them more than to be taken for gipsies .sx " A historical novel , then ; period :sx that time in the reign of Henry VIII when the Church was menaced by the Reformation , the old nobility by the agents of Cromwell and the poor by the conversion of arable land into pasture .sx There were many who would have had a use for what Mr. Buchan has provided - a handsome young changeling brought up at Oseney as Peter Pentecost but known to certain plotters as the son of " Lady Elinor , the eldest daughter of Percy of Northumberland " and " of that high and puissant prince , Edward , Duke and Earl of Buckingham .sx .. and in virtue of the blood of Bohun , Lord High Constable of England .sx " Splendid .sx At the outset Peter , dejected at his prospects as a poor scholar , welcomed the adventure in being figure-head of a rising against the King .sx But Mr. Buchan would have to part company with history if he took Peter near the throne .sx He sees to it that Peter is abruptly disillusioned .sx Moreover , Peter is not the stuff of which usurpers are made ; the sordid exigencies of revolutionary politics are repugnant to him ; Hamlet rather than MacBeth should have supplied the title of his story , for he saves the king's life when he might have stood aside and let him drown .sx In regard to Beauty , treasure and the greenwood , Peter does his devoir by Romance ; but for a hero of Mr. Buchan's he is passive .sx His chief function is to lend Mr. Buchan clear-sighted eyes through which to survey the England of the period .sx The blanket is presumably Tudor despotism .sx Under it live things are writhing convulsively in many forms .sx Mr. Buchan contrives to invest his nobles , from the king downwards , with dignity and nerve without any concealment of their unscrupulous self-seeking .sx From Mr. Buchan's other books one assumes his preference in woman is for Artemis ; it is interesting to find him constraining himself to let her accept the mate dictated by Renaissance ambitions .sx THE MONTH OF MAY .sx The birthday of an old gentleman of eighty-four with its appropriate celebrations is the excuse for Jane Dashwood's delicately-penetrating and charming study of an English family .sx She allows herself but twenty-four hours out of THE MONTH OF MAY ( John Murray , 7s .sx 6d .sx net ) , but they are enough for her purpose ; and since she may order her own weather she has consulted the poets and furnished her book with the colour and sparkle , the scent and bird-song that May can and should produce .sx Of birds she knows more than a little , observing them wittily and gaily , and of human beings ( and human beings united as families ) she knows still more .sx She can suggest their apparent and their real relation with one another , convey what they looked like and retail their remarks with an ease that is consistently entertaining .sx She shows kindness without satire .sx We meet the Willoughbys of Severals .sx There are three daughters and a daughter-in-law , the old parents - each a finished and definite personality - and a sprinkling of grandchildren .sx Mary lives at home ; and her quiet story is revealed as incidents recall her past to her mind , and is rounded out by the events of the birthday as its hours slip by .sx She has seen one sister marry a curate and become the popular novelist " John Stormaway " and the mother of a trio of sons named after early Saxon notabilities .sx She has sympathised with a younger sister who hates her home and has fled to London and freedom .sx She has accepted without criticism her only brother's snobbish and selfish wife .sx She has lost the young man she might have married and has successfully hidden her lifelong lover for her cousin Dick , who has crashed badly in matrimony and in his career .sx At the close of old Mr. Willoughby's birthday Dick makes a dramatic and brief reappearance and sweeps her off her feet .sx Will Mary meet him in London next morning and go with him to the Argentine ?sx Dick's feeling for her matches hers for him , and is as old and tried .sx She will ; it is already arranged that she goes up to London by the early train .sx Dick leaves on the wings of storm as it were ; and the Storm breaks over Severals , whose guests have now departed , leaving the old couple and Mary and the domestic staff to their customary quiet .sx The old man refreshes his memory out of Malory - " the month of May was come , when every heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth fruit " - and Mary with a quickened emotion hears the familiar passage for the second time that day .sx It storms ; the old couple are upset .sx Next day Mary does not keep her promise to go up to London .sx A slight story and an extremely skilful one , told with reticence and grace ; incomplete , if you will , considering the overemphasis in art and life to which we are all accustomed , but alive and distinguished .sx THE SHORTEST NIGHT .sx In novels the fashion is for murder stories , and in THE SHORTEST NIGHT ( Heinemann , 7s .sx 6d .sx net ) Miss G. B. Stern is conscientiously up to date .sx But - to adopt a phrase from her description of her Lady Humber - it cannot be claimed for her Muse that she possesses " the massive baroque figure " with which credits the mannequins who launched the mode .sx She is too petite to carry off without modification its heavy brocades , and she has studied her type too carefully to make the attempt .sx It is a type that has something in common with one Rumples , who is presented as apostrophizing the little fish in a Riviera bathing pool :sx " All right , baby mullets or whatever you are .sx .. You're just like beautiful shiny little thoughts whisking through her head ; thoughts she has to catch and write down and earn pennies with .sx " Whisking !sx - it is as much the Muse's function as dancing was Perdita's ; even the corpse has to adapt itself to her arbitrary measure :sx she whisks a solution in front of the reader , and whisks it away before he has time to say that it does not conform to the rules .sx The reader who considers himself invited to cooperate in detection must seek another corpse .sx To enjoy the book he must regard its corpse not as a factor in a calculation but as a talisman in a fantasy .sx Confronted with it in turn , the characters reveal their idiosyncrasies in a coruscation of shiny little thoughts .sx The book begins as fashion dictates - with a sketch map .sx The map shows a villa on the edge of the sea somewhere near Cannes .sx A most eligible villa for a corpse , for the bed-rooms all communicate with each other .sx The villa is occupied by Mrs. Framlingham and her young friends .sx They bathe and bask all day " in a careless minimum of costume , " but there are no sexual irregularities in the paraded intimacy of their relations .sx Hence one of the most shining of the little thoughts .sx