13. G. A. L. Burgeon (= Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair
It is not easy to review a book of which Mr de la Mare, in a delightful introduction, has said much of what one most wants to say: I pick out what is left.
First let me try to guard against possible mistakes. This is not primarily a book for solicitors. Or rather, it will give a different kind of pleasure-recognition or discovery – according as you have or have not seen for yourself the Lynxies, Glossies and Applejohns at coffee in the cavernous depths of the Law Society or studied the late Lord MacNaughton's judgments (Green Room details interest no one as much as actors; except the public.)
Secondly, this is not a study in schizophrenia. The rift between Mr ‘Burgeon’ and his ‘partner Burden’, whom he has created, whose professional smiles he has to manage for him and who threatens one night to kill him, is not pathological. It is the rift in every life between the human person and his public persona, between, say, the man and the bus conductor or the man and the king. Schizophrenia occurs when the marriage of these two has ended in divorce or desertion. Mr ‘Burgeon’ describes the ordinary cat-and-dog rubbing-along-somehow which we all know so well. But we did not know it nearly so well before we read this book.
That is what shows that the author's separation of ‘Burden’ and ‘Burgeon’ is not pathological. It is genuine invention, the Idea which organizes and masters all the diverse experiences he is working on. Idea in this sense is not to be confused with the ‘ideas’ which ‘Mr Burgeon’ puts forward. Of these there are several; some of his legal ‘ideas’ seem to me well worth consideration. The Idea which I am speaking of is the literary idea, the idea which creates Form; as the ‘idea of big and little men’ makes Gulliver possible and a darker idea makes possible the Confessions of a Glorified Sinner. Books springing from an Idea, in this sense, and especially books in which that Idea does its work exactly and no other Idea would have done it as well, have a good chance of being small scale classics. I am not at all certain that This Ever Diverse Pair is not in that category. I suppose (since nearly everyone will mention them) I must say that Jekyll and Hyde are a different idea, and a far older one, as old, indeed, as the Epistle to the Romans.
The contrast between Burden and Burgeon is not primarily an ethical contrast. There are, indeed, moments at which they stand to one another as the ‘higher’ to the ‘lower’ self or the New to the Old Man. But that is only one aspect of an all-pervasive diversity. In the tragic inner life ‘God wot, no villain need be.’ Burgeon, the poet and scholar, may chafe at the Burden whom he himself has made so ‘like a real solicitor’ but he is no position to treat him de haut en bas. If you do not grasp this, the day of judgment (in more than one sense) which concludes the book will take you, as it took Burgeon, very much by surprise.
In another way, to be sure, it should and will surprise every reader, as the unforeseen, yet inevitable, solution both of a technical and a spiritual problem. Not all Ideas come thus provided with their own exit. In this conclusion the gaiety and the gravity of the book reach their height at the same moment. Anguish is inherent in the theme; those who have, with Burgeon, skirted the realm of Rhematophobia know that. Yet it is not a sad book with a nagging undertone of melancholy. It is high and sharp philosophic comedy, more fully a work of art and more original than anything I have read for a long time. I wished it longer – which shows, perhaps, that it is the right length.