Burgeon recognizes a spiritual dimension to reality although he has not discovered its life-giving power.
We see that Burden is a materialist, or at least has allowed materialist principles to guide his life and work, and has neglected, almost to the point of annihilation, the life and work of the spirit. In the last chapter, after things have reached a critical level between the two partners, Burgeon finds himself with Burden in the dock, in a prophetic dream set in the 1990s, and in a time when crime is viewed as a kind of disease (134). In the dream, Justice finds that Burden is too fond of security and has no imagination. For purgation he must leave the legal profession to perform menial tasks in a family of five (137), and he must read fairy tales aloud to the children and read Blake and other poets aloud to the lady of the house. In addition, he will be required to actually make up stories (138).
I am very grateful for the Barfield Sampler edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas, and for their helpful commentary, but I have to disagree with Hunter when she says that Burgeon is “Barfield’s true self in This Ever Diverse Pair” (129). It’s obvious to readers that Burden has major problems, but perhaps because many Barfield readers are creative, moral people, it may be harder to see the flaws in Burgeon. But Barfield saw them. In the courtroom dream, Burgeon seems to fare well with Justice; he is found to be “of exceptionally high character” and with “considerable mental powers.” However, he is accused of having a mind that “soars rather too easily-like a balloon” (138-139). Burgeon, too, has selfish and unhealthy motives. He’s writing the diary, he says, “for my own salvation. Burden is eating me up, my time, my wit, my memory, my ‘shaping spirit of imagination,’ my whole me!” (19). He regrets being unable to write the sort of things he likes most to write: romantic and emotional poems that are “written to relieve my personal griefs” (17). His curiosity takes him on rabbit-trails when he is supposed to be doing legal research, and he much prefers walking by the river than completing work on cases. Yes, Burgeon is the creative, idealistic partner, but his “imagination” is colored too much by mere fancy.
Barfield chose for the epigram to What Coleridge Thought this quotation from Daniel Deronda: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Burgeon has neglected “solid fact,” and his idealistic fancies are impotent to produce real change in his, or Burden’s, condition. Because he shrinks from any “conflict of wills,” he has pretended all was well, “and so he fell” (141). His purgation is to “continue as a solicitor until further Order” (142).
We have seen the partners are caught in a moral dilemma, evidencing itself in a psychological polarity. The only way “out” is through the birthing of a new, united self, and this can only be accomplished through willing obedience to imagination rooted in love. In the afterword to Orpheus, John Ulreich notes, “The true, organic polarity of imagination is to be found only in the interpenetration of poetic and prosaic principles [. . . ] in the creative love that suffers death in order to be reborn (132). He goes on to say, “in every case the reconciliation of opposites produces not merely recovery but a recreation of meaning” (133). This recreation is redemptive-a moral balance is reached and the true, unified self is nurtured toward wholeness. Barfield has said that “moral imagination is the dialectic, or rather the polarity, of love. It is only through moral imagination that we can become fully aware even of ourselves as subjects” (“Either: Or” 40).
For Burgeon, and presumably for Barfield himself, this awareness of the self as subject comes about through writing. In Poetic Diction, Barfield says, “Language is the storehouse of imagination” (23). Burgeon tells us, “If this partner of mine kept a real diary, there would be no need to write all this about him” (13). Kranidas notes of Barfield’s work that “There are over two hundred lyrics” (27), and in many of these poems, he says, “there is a self-effected rescue, often in the face of despair [. . .] of withdrawal, of beckoning and approaching death. The rescue is effected often through the medium of words which become the stuff of continuity” (28). And, I might add, the avenue of imagination.
Imagination provides the creative impulse which finds a path toward wholeness. Burgeon works this out through keeping a diary, as he says, “for my own salvation” (Pair 19). Barfield expresses his emotional connection to writing in the poem, “Sapphics,” with this:
O mad, O intractable mistress, English!
Time-miraculously-annihilating,
Undeserved, unpublished, aloof, astounding
Comfort of writing!
(Hunter 34)