This arises possibly from the artist's fondness for attitude. He seems to have regarded posture-making as a peculiar attribute of genius. His figures are always in a constrained and over-studied pose: twisting about in the throes of giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine _afflatus_, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces. His Handel is in a state of exceeding perturbation: his clothes in staring disorder, his hair floating in the breeze. The intention was to represent the composer in the act of raptured meditation upon music; but, as Allan Cunningham remarks, he looks much more like a man alarmed at an apparition. But then this exaggeration of demeanour was very much the artist's own manner in actual life. The Frenchman has always a sort of innate histrionic faculty: he is for ever, perhaps unconsciously, playing a part. So Roubiliac was himself incessantly acting and attitudinizing, much after the fashion of his statues. He seemed to hold that it was expedient, for the better preventing of mistakes about the matter, that genius should always in such way advertise itself; there was danger lest it should not be believed in if it left off making grimaces and striking attitudes. Perhaps from his own point of view, and in his own time, the artist was right. It was necessary then to do something to arrest the attention of a public apathetic on the subject of art-talent, unless, as Peter Pindar sang, the artist 'had been dead a hundred years.' Possibly, the only way for a man in those days to gain credit as a genius was by affecting eccentricity and unconventionality: taking heed that all his proceedings were as unlike other people's as possible. Thereupon the world argued: geniuses are not as we are; this person is not as we are; therefore he must be a genius. Q.E.D.