Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but a _mimesis_ or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the pages of the _Field_, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different handwriting. The difficulty of remaining _loyal_, which I mention elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and _vice versa_; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman. In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly hostile to each other. “Yet these are all the same stuff, really, The obverse and reverse, if you look closely, Of busy imagination’s new-coined money-- And if you watch the blind Phototropisms of my fluttering mind, Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully Its bale-fire eyes, Or whether childishly I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace To play with toys until those horrors leave me, Yet note, whichever way I find release, By fight or flight, By being wild or tame, The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.” LI THE PIG BABY