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Decie was happiest in conversations of a literary order, making frequent use of such expressions as: "After all, it produces an illusion does anything else matter?" "Rather a poseur, is he not?" "A question, that, of temperament," or "A matter of the definition of words"; and other charming generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far, and are pleasingly irrefutable.
The avocat lifted a hand in mute disacknowledgment. Again there was a silence, and out of the pause Monsieur De la Riviere's voice was heard. "Monsieur Valmond, how fares this spirit of France now you come from France?" There was a shadow of condescension and ulterior meaning in De la Riviere's voice, for he had caught the tricks of the poseur in this singular gentleman.
He was, we were inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style, played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earned Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariable neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome.
It may be argued that Borrow was merely posing as a great traveller, but the foregoing remarks are too casual, too much in the nature of asides, to be the utterances of a poseur. A man seeking to impress himself upon the world as a great traveller would probably have been a little more definite.
Poseur, perhaps, but an emperor these days may need to be a poseur in order to wear the ermine of Divine Right convincingly to most of his subjects. His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has never given down on that point, however much he has applied State Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation.
The accent and the stick went together into the gutter, Stanton laughingly told us. An immortal moment! The poseur with his mask off, at last! Beneath all that grease-paint and charlatanism there was a solid, suffering, lonely man; and even in his own dazed condition Stanton was quick to recognize it, and to rejoice in the revelation.
Through Mr. Hendricks he had learned something more about Jim Doyle, the real Doyle and not the poseur, and he felt she should know the nature of the accusations against him. Lily mixed up with a band of traitors, Lily of the white flame of patriotism, was unthinkable. She must not go to the house on Cardew Way. A man's loyalty was like a woman's virtue; it could not be questionable.
The great dramatist will have the great qualities needed, sensibility, sympathy, insight, imagination, and courage. The special pleader and the poseur lack all these things, and they make themselves and their work foolish. Let us stand for the truth, not pruning it for the occasion.
Whistler has been called the greatest poseur of his day; and yet he is the most sincere and truthful of men the very antithesis of hypocrisy and sham. No man ever hated pretense more. Whistler is an artist, and the soul of the man is revealed in his work not in his hat, nor yet his bamboo cane, nor his long black coat, much less the language which he uses, Talleyrand-like, to conceal his thought.
Of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of an insane self-consciousness in its presence.
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