Basically, Hartley's novels seem variations on the Bildungsroman, the traditional novel of quest for selfhood. In each a more or less sensitive, perhaps slightly neurotic protagonist … undergoes some part of the inward journey from innocence through experience to higher innocence, in a setting documenting one of the crucial moments in recent history: the beginnings of the century and life among the country houses of the Edwardian era; World War I; English society in between-the-wars Venice; World War II; the Welfare State and the crumbling of the class system; the post-World-War-III future. (p. 9)

Hartley is an explorer of our own age, not a gentle fabler of the past. At his best he asks more questions than he answers; he tries to let us experience in microcosm and think about the dilemmas and contradictions and polarities of living when and where we live. With the protagonists we sway between imaginativeness and a sense of reality, between going along with the current sense of life and trying to go against it, between a regard for one's own selfhood and the call to place others before that self. From the dialectics emerge, from time to time, evidences of forces which insist upon being recognized, though we have sworn they are not there. Hartley's universe keeps suggesting at their work those mysterious realities which we used to call evil, grace and Providence—and to which, he seems to imply, we may have to give new names and new responses.

Hartley's world is recognizably that described by Camus and Sartre, in which man must at length face his absurdity, his pitiable fate, his burden of guilt, and act in full knowledge of his impotence. But it is also a world which would have been quite comprehensible to Emily Brontë, whose poems he quotes so often as epigraphs…. (p. 10)

To this sternly-limited material, experiential, existential world in which we live Hartley introduces a genre which questions the opacity of that materiality, which casts upon it light calculated to reveal monstrous shapes and shadows above and behind. His characters try to be, like Hawthorne's, representative and illustrative, his plots attempt the apocalyptic—but they are built upon a base so realistic in characterization and social examination that it is often mistaken for Hartley's essential contribution. (pp. 10-11)

The form of Hartley's novels is, like the typical romance [Northrop] Frye describes, dialectical. Characters are linked to attitudes, world-views, dreams, ideas: usually inadequate by their very over-abstraction, over-simplification. Interaction with others and with life hardens or alters or reverses these attitudes. At the end we are usually confronted with a death, real or symbolic, and the problem of deciding whether that death represents utter tragedy and failure, or signals a successful resolution—the only possible resolution—of the dilemmas of life. Man, living, must always be torn between the opposing forces of matter and spirit, fact and ideal, Hartley seems to say—the best he can do, living, is to accept polarities and conflicts as the stuff of existence. Peace and reconciliation are somehow bound up with death—or with managing to give over one's material existence to a spiritual one. Whether this is a horror or the beginning of new life Hartley does not quite tell us.

If he suggests answers at all in his old-yet-new universe (and I am not sure that he does), they would seem to be along the lines of a somewhat existentialist approach to Christianity: a Christianity willingly relinquishing its pretensions to superior knowledge and power and affirming its oneness with human misery and helplessness; a Christianity cleansed of the abstract, the legalistic, the overly rational, and stressing above all the personal, the concrete, the leap of faith, the centrality of love and self-giving; a Christianity facing the universe with all the agony and unknowingness of modern mankind, yet willing to die for others. (pp. 14-15)

Almost all of Hartley's short stories, many of which are brought together in … The Collected Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, are best seen, perhaps, as studies, sketches, experiments for those larger canvasses. Here, over the years, he creates characters to embody themes, attitudes and points of view, finds objects to symbolize inner life and change, broods over and highlights events which seem to reflect mysterious universal laws. If Hartley's earlier novels can so finely suggest the density and complexity of experience, it is surely because in exercises like the stories he has painstakingly tried to capture, to explore and elaborate, one by one, the individual elements and perspectives which go to make up his vision of complexity. (p. 17)

The same themes and concerns weave in and out of all Hartley's stories, but in the first group he seemed to experiment mainly with expressing mental or psychological states; in the second, his more farfetched Gothic tales, with metaphysical statements about the whole of human existence; in the later volumes, with the locating of his enduring dilemmas in very contemporary problems like the relation between the artist and society, the pitfalls of modern sexual mores and modern marriage. Yet in all three types of stories, Hartley is talking about the same things. From Night Fears onward, he is concerned with the life of the mind in its relation to the 'real' world, and looking for ways of catching, in a symbolic event or tableau, the discrepancy between ideal and actual, between the imagined, the abstracted, the mentally organized, and the complexity of experience…. Hartley's own chosen method of symbolism seems appropriate to his own 'existentialist conclusion'—the symbol or symbolic situation in which he embodies each new version of the dilemma is, itself, in its concreteness, a contradiction of abstraction and idealization (while at the same time attesting to the need for the imprint of mind and imagination). (pp. 17-18)

What do we take from these first of Hartley's sketches? Concerns and a method that were to last him all his life long. The complexity of reality, the oftentimes sinister chaos at its heart, the seeming impossibility of capturing the truth about any aspect of life or reality in abstractions or categories. On the other hand, the restlessness of the human mind, free to override mere reality and experience and to be creative of its own versions of existence; the constant, constantly frustrated striving after meaning, form, a principle. Overall, the duality in us and in our universe…. Hartley first begins to embody states of mind: to give arms and legs and actions to the hidden halves of men's personalities; to let guilt and fear and Puritanism and hedonism become actors in little dramas.

Hartley's symbolism is of several kinds. First of all, the basic situation of each sketch is an embodiment of a moral question, perhaps of varying points of view—usually highly visual, perhaps static. These are tableaux, comparable to scenes in a well-made film by someone like Antonioni in which the visible relationships between the characters' positions in a room suggest all that is going on beneath the surface. (p. 23)

In general, Hartley reinforces his central situational symbolism and meaning by finding other symbols to echo and extend it. Sometimes this is in the use of a single, central, emblematic symbol, like that of 'Apples'. Rupert as a child wants those apples when he wants them. He will inconvenience his Uncle Tim, break his little sister's doll, to try to get them, all unripe as they are. Rupert as a sensual, self-indulgent man of thirty finds overripe apples falling all about him—and they make him sick. The apples are a kind of objective correlative for Rupert, his goals, and what happens to him and them; his attitude towards the apples, at both stages, is an index to his character and his happiness….

More generally, Hartley adds emphasis and extra dimensions to his meaning with a variety of incidental symbolism. He experiments, often over-obviously, with furniture and clothing and natural surroundings…. (p. 24)

One of the first discoveries we might expect to make—and do make—is that there is mysterious evil in this universe, in man and seemingly in untamed nature within and without him. Hartley deals extensively in curses ('Feet Foremost'), haunted houses ('A Change of Ownership')—sometimes involving commerce with the devil ('The Thought'), but usually revolving around the return of someone or other from the dead to avenge his attempted destruction…. There is evil at the heart of life; there is an evil side even to love.

But if un-lovingness and misdirected love kill, as Hartley suggests, he seems to suggest also that authentic love, the real placing of another's good before one's own—gives life. The image he uses for this kind of love, at least in the story where his meaning is most clear, is sacrificial death (or the willingness to undergo death for another). (pp. 27-8)

Hartley's incidental symbolism is carefully worked-at to fill out this sense of a huge economy of good and evil, love and non-love. The country houses are all replete with Gothic wings, disused churches, slimy moats—touches that set them apart in the realm of the past, or that perhaps set the scoffed-at beliefs of the past against the flatness of the sceptical present, to ask which is greater truth. (p. 28)

In any case, we are clearly dealing with the making real of an inner vision and its clash with actual physical facts. And Hartley relates this individual self-deception to the larger problems of human relationships, including the war; to pre-war aestheticism and individualism and the separation of art from life; to the post-war tendency of British art, perhaps, or the British upper classes, to long for the serenity and irresponsibility of the past and a no longer viable beauty and culture; to all current temptations to ignore reality, the hard lessons of the war, the challenges of the present. In such dissections of his own class and profession, Hartley seems to be grappling with the problems and contradictions he feels within his own being—that is why he can present them with such complexity and balance and leave us with very real questions instead of simplistic answers. (pp. 34-5)

The trilogy Eustace and Hilda (1944–47) is thought by many to be L. P. Hartley's masterpiece. A subtle and sensitive detailing of a life and of the relationship which dominates, characterizes and seemingly destroys that life, the trilogy is first of all the tragedy of Eustace, who dies because he and Hilda can no longer exist in the same world, because one can only live at the expense of the other. But Eustace and Hilda seems also the story of the achievement, the strange salvation of Eustace, who dies after learning what few manage to learn—to love.

The story of Eustace and Hilda is also the story of an age—our age—at its inception. The years of Eustace's growth and struggle and defeat (or victory) are the years of the death of the Past: the death not only of Victorianism, but of absolutes, of assumptions, of God. Eustace's is the world which pronounces all the gods dead, all the wars fought, all the faiths in man shaken; it can offer him nothing but death. (p. 42)

It is very possible—especially if one reads Hartley's everpresent symbols and the dreams and fantasies he gives to Eustace in a conventionally Freudian sense—to see this novel only as the sadly comic tragedy of a boy destroyed by his environment: specifically his sister's domination, his own guilt and death wish….

It is certainly true that Eustace and Hilda is tragic, that it points to terrible forces at work in man's life, that much of its basic plot can be interpreted in a coherently Freudian way. But it is important to see that Hartley's symbolism (like all true symbolism) is multivalent. We may read Eustace and Hilda as a Freudian psychological study, as we may read much of Hawthorne. But we may also, and I think here more importantly and inclusively, read the trilogy as the kind of 'apocalyptic' work Hartley attributed to Hawthorne. In Hartley as in Hawthorne, good and evil are the main, the only issue—though, as in Hawthorne, we may see the good and evil as relating primarily to one's own complexes, guilts, fears and their effects, or to a supernatural order in which God's (or Someone's) Providence directs, rewards, punishes. Or perhaps both Hartley and Hawthorne are saying that the two are one. (p. 45)

The events, the entire physical world of objects and people take on more and more possible meanings as the story proceeds and these events, objects and people are linked with, paralleled to others…. One senses that silence, speech, language all have their shimmering significance, as well as L-shapes, arches, squares, circles and all the colours of the rainbow…. Symbolic meanings touch and shift and interrelate; one thinks one sees a coherent pattern in the world of value and significance which radiates from and surrounds the visible, material one. One grasps at it and tries to fix it, and it shimmers again and shows another face. (p. 46)

Eustace and Hilda could be seen as a Bildungsroman in which the lesson Eustace has to learn just may be that 'he who loses his life shall find it'. (p. 50)

The visions of perfect unity, balance and harmony which keep recurring in Eustace's life are the dreams of every man, torn and divided; here they are connected variously, through symbols, with union with Hilda (or Reality); with human effort and art (incarnating spirit, marrying body and soul); with selfgiving; with death; with eternity. (p. 53)

It seems to me that Eustace and Hilda best makes its mark, is most fully understood and of most lasting interest when seen as a romance in the Hawthornian vein, taking description and characterization that is often more realistic than Hawthorne's but transforming it into symbolic suggestion of the mysterious spiritual universe surrounding and enfolding its materiality. (p. 61)

Hartley's version of romance, incorporating the most modern of novelistic techniques, builds on a foundation of realistic social and historical detail: asks its ultimate questions not in the abstract but in the context of our own age, its history, its bitter 'Experience'. Depicting 'the surface of life' as well as 'trying to interpret' it, Hartley gives a rich and faithful and perceptive picture of the early twentieth century and its changes in class structure and dominance, in religion, in styles of life and thought. (p. 63)

One can, in fact, see most of Hartley's novels as a very personal continuing dialogue with himself, at various ages and in various circumstances, about the meaning of life. (p. 72)

[The Go-Between] could be seen as Hartley's 'Young Goodman Brown', addressed to an England dry and disillusioned after the Walpurgisnacht of world war. Characteristically, however, Hartley's book ends—not, as Hawthorne's story does, with the death of the innocent-turned-cynic—but at the moment when he at last comprehends what has happened to him. Hartley wants, perhaps, to show the postwar world a complex symbolic picture of the past fifty years. Having put the last piece in place before his audience, he will step back, his task done, to see if in the flash of comprehension any spark of new life is communicated. (p. 97)

Hartley experiments with a new structure for The Go-Between, one which can move back and forth between single and 'double' vision and enable us, even more than is usual in his novels, to experience the dialectic between fact and imagination. The book is about seeing, about vision and double vision. Its frame-story is the encounter of a sixty-five-year-old bibliographer—buried for years under 'cliffs' of dingy paper—with his diary, the diary which tells the story of the summer of 1900 and the blighting of his life…. In fact, the book is the extension of an argument in the Prologue … between the twelve-year-old Leo and the sixty-five-year-old Leo over the content of the diary, the meaning of that summer and love affair, the meaning of life and love in general. Looking through the two pairs of eyes (actually the same pair, fifty years apart) so contrasting in their viewpoint, yet so alike in the extremism and romanticism at the root of their judgements, we are able to see sinners and sinned-against with much more sympathy and understanding than either; able, too, to understand more of the human mixture that has gone into the making of 'this hideous century we live in'…. (p. 98)

The Go-Between is a book, an experience which can immeasurably increase one's penetration into, one's love for and acceptance of life, one's 'tolerance for ambiguity' in people and events—that primary attribute, according to some social scientists, of true maturity. Leo seems just possibly on the verge of attaining some such maturity, at sixty-five, as we close the book, and Hartley's art is such that we understand the preciousness and rarity of the achievement, even at such an age.

Hartley's frame structure, the single/double pair of eyes through which he has us look, is the means by which he makes his narrative into a romance while yet criticizing those who romanticize…. Surely there is something of transcendent meaning in these people and their story and the century half gone by? And if there is myth and transcendence in their story, it is because there is in all love stories, in all lives, including our own. This romance warns us of the dangers of romanticizing, yet it shows us that the dry, peeled vision Leo has tried to practise since Brandham Hall is also inadequate. (pp. 99-100)

How, then, to combine the child's spiritual vision with the grown man's knowledge of evil? It is the same question Blake asked long ago. Hartley gives no very strong and sure answer in the book—he is too concerned with showing us exactly where we are today. But the book as a whole seems to call for a Higher Innocence, for a rebirth of faith and vision in a people whose ideals have been shocked and defeated by the evil and violence and ugliness of our century. (p. 100)

[One] of Hartley's characteristic analogues or epitomes or controlling symbols summing up the meaning of the whole book [is] the encounter of the overly-innocent with the unsuspected—and deadly—force of Nature (and human nature in particular). This is a perfect example of the way in which Hartley can render complexities of inner experience through the detailed description of a symbol or analogy. In the boy's descriptions we catch the strong sexual hints … but the boy does not know what he is describing or why it is so strong, so primeval, so dangerous, so frightening, yet so weak.

In The Go-Between it is easy to recognize Hartley's favourite motif—of the very human tendency to believe in the Eden one longs for as already existing, to see human nature as self-perfectible when its wishes, its desires for the beautiful and pleasing are unobstructed. This tendency, Hartley shows us over and over again,… can only be destructive. There is evil at the heart of the universe, in Nature, in human nature—it cannot, perhaps, be fully understood, but it must be reckoned with…. But Leo's story is even more a criticism of those who saw and see the twentieth century, culmination of so many years of cultivation and humanism and scientific achievement, as, logically, a Golden Age of human fulfilment—and who cannot comprehend or encompass the devastating wars which have characterized it…. Hartley is offering war as supreme proof that humanism is inadequate to man's needs, that man's animal nature alone is no key to his life and happiness, that there are—must be—transcendental truths and standards and a world of the spirit, a spiritual dimension, which gives meaning to the physical: that without access to that dimension we are lost. (pp. 105-06)

The Go-Between is unquestionably one of Hartley's most successful romances—if not the most successful. It is a small book, tightly unified by its frame structure, its two viewpoints which are really one, its many recurring symbols of colour, heat, natural surroundings, clothing, and the spells, signs of the Zodiac and mythical figures by which a small boy's imagination turns the natural into the supernatural. (pp. 110-11)

The Go-Between is pervaded with sexual feeling, with the sense of the power and heat (literally, since this is one of his chief symbols) of sexual passion. The fact that Leo is uncomprehending and describes all with an innocent eye makes the reader's awareness and understanding all the stronger. What is Hartley saying about sex in letting it be the chief agent of destruction in this novel? Mainly, I think, that it is one of the chief manifestations of that lovely but flawed, deceptive and deadly Nature about which man since Rousseau is apt to be a little too naïve and trusting. At the heart of things for fallen man there is a great blackness which he cannot discount; he must learn to face the void with courage and love, but he can never come completely to terms with it. And specifically: if modern man is going to make a mystique of sex, going to see it as an agent of salvation, Hartley wants to warn that it could just as easily—given its strength, its potential for deadliness—be an agent of tremendous destruction.

The symbolic method Hartley has evolved seems perfect for the complex world into which he wants to introduce us: a world in which we see men slipping, over and over again, into some version of romanticism, of hubris, of the belief that we are immortal, unflawed, can control events, ourselves, our destinies. Each of Hartley's modern romances is a questioning, a probing—usually a tragic refutation—of this attitude, this hope…. In all these modern romances Hartley deflates the man of imagination, the humanist, the aesthete, the optimist, for their over-simplifications; he shows us the world's blackness. But he is asking that we learn to meet that blackness with imagination and hope, and that we rediscover, before it is too late, the true meaning of man's spiritual aspirations. (pp. 111-12)

Many critics have praised L. P. Hartley's achievement while stressing the 'limited' sphere in which it takes place. Hartley protagonists … tend to be men and women of one mould, their experiences basically similar; Hartley settings (with the exception of Facial Justice) are eminently predictable. But one must perhaps find another term than 'limited' to describe an artist who tries to create a new genre—lightly comic but deadly serious—in order to raise, amid the pettinesses of everyday social life; the ultimate questions of existence. Hartley may sometimes fail, his failures may even approach the ludicrous or the maddening, because he attempts so much; his trying to locate eternal, implacable Evil in a West End flat or a suburban garden may approach the absurd, may end, as Angus Wilson believes it does, in confusing manners with morals. But those who would confine his interests to exploring certain types of neurotic personality, certain classes in British society or periods in British history, even certain moral conflicts between the individual and the collectivity, certainly misread. The Hartley subject is Everyman: the meaning of his love, life, death in the modern world; and Hartley's novels, far from fitting into an established pattern, have been worthwhile investigations into forms whereby such a subject may be exploited. (p. 155)

The romance genre, that blend of mythical patterns and everyday experience which is basic to most of Hartley's experiments, is at one with the meaning it seeks to convey. From the total body of Hartley's work emerges a shadowy, shifting world-picture in which images of absurdity, contradiction, negation and death seem to mingle or alternate with those of self-discovery, radiance and renewal. Now these prevail, now those, and it is a risk to try to fix a Hartley 'system'. If there is consistency, it is a consistency in which Jungian and Kierkegaardian concerns seem to meet—both of which visions would insist first of all that salvation and truth are of no system, but of the individual.

And so the individual search for salvation, for meaning, is the core of, the key to, the Hartley cosmos. The search takes place amid the seemingly opaque properties and petty events of contemporary urban and suburban life—except that always an imaginative eye within the story (usually the protagonist's own) gives us a vision of these landscapes and homes and clothes and pleasures as the stuff of dreams and Golden Ages, of gods and demons, heavens and hells. When the dreams fail, as they always do, when absurdity and irrationality are seen to prevail, when all that the individual has been building and planning comes to grief as it invariably does—we know we have watched something suggestive of life, ending, as life does, in death. (p. 156)

Anne Mulkeen, in her Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley (reprinted by permission of the Wayne State University Press; copyright © 1974 by Anne Mulkeen), Wayne State University Press, 1974, 193 p.