Leo Colston is Hartley’s most fully rendered protagonist. He is also the only one to tell his story in the first person. Presenting his story from the dual perspectives of 1900 and 1952, the elder Leo comments reflectively on the experiences narrated directly by his thirteen-year-old self. In Leo’s character, Hartley treats the problem of moral responsibility, the central concern of his fiction. He also deals with the topic of the past’s effect on the present. When Leo was thirteen in 1900, his ignorance of the facts of life, not merely those about human sexuality, made him unfit for moral insight. The elder Leo’s Proustian effort to recapture past time enables him to perceive moral significance. In token of his capacity to judge and to act, Leo is able to visualize the facade of Brandham Hall for the first time in more than fifty years.

He is also able to see that Marian, Ted, and Lord Trimingham were neither demigods nor callous manipulators of his childhood self. He recognizes that all three were genuinely fond of the boy he once was. They did not seek to hurt him. Leo faces the fact that he conspired in his own deception, by viewing events through the romantic screen of a personal allegory. Hartley’s treatment of these characters stresses both the subjectivity of young Leo and the potential in the three adults for the heroic attributes he assigns them. The tragedy of the love triangle derives from the fact that they fail to rise to the roles assigned them in Leo’s personal drama.

The pivotal relationship is that of Leo and Marian Maudsley. She prompts him to enter the world of his imagination by buying him a green summer suit and playing a flirtatious Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. The bicycle she purchases as his birthday gift is also green. Hartley’s description of the grounds surrounding Brandham Hall stresses their lush vegetation. Yet Leo fails to recognize the potential for evil embodied in the Atropa belladonna in a ruined outbuilding. The plant, looking like a woman standing in a doorway, recalls the sexual temptation of young Robin in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Like so many of the male protagonists in Hawthorne’s stories, Hartley’s Leo is an innocent who walks through a moral wilderness in which the forces of good and evil struggle for his soul. In its association with Marian Maudsley, the belladonna represents sexual initiation, the attraction of lust, and the corruption of innocent love.

Yet the equation is more complex than that. In his relationships with Viscount Trimingham and Ted Burgess, Leo faces a choice between models of male behavior. Frightened by his own sexual feelings, he rejects Ted and both the passion and the love the farmer feels for Marian. He affirms the sterile code of the gentleman embodied by the scarred, perhaps symbolically impotent, Viscount.

Leo Colston

Leo Colston, a bachelor librarian in his sixties and self-proclaimed “foreigner in the world of the emotions.” Colston’s discovery of the diary he kept in the summer of 1900, the year he turned thirteen, precipitates release of the repressed memories of the people and events that led to his withdrawal from emotional relationships. The young Leo, imaginative, sensitive, and eager to please, his values and vision determined by the self-centeredness of a child, visits the estate of a schoolmate. Interpreting the kindness of the young adults there as affection for him, Leo feels humiliated when he realizes that their attention to him derives from their use of him as a messenger. Leo’s...