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Updated: May 19, 2025
Though he knew de Batz to be an ardent Royalist, and even an active adherent of the monarchy, he was soon conscious of a vague sense of mistrust of this pompous, self-complacent individual, whose every utterance breathed selfish aims rather than devotion to a forlorn cause. Therefore, when the curtain rose at last on the first act of Moliere's witty comedy, St.
No shadow of his coming troubles seems to have flitted before the eyes of the Emperor during the weeks that he was thus occupied weeks which he passed in self-complacent contemplation of the past and dreams of an impossible future. Suddenly, tidings of a most alarming kind dispelled his pleasing visions, and roused him to renewed exertions. Revolt, he found, had broken out everywhere in his rear.
Our later experience with cities has rudely disturbed this too confident frame of mind. It has furnished facts which do not seem to fit our self-complacent theory, so that now our writers and speakers are inclined to vent their spleen upon the unhappy cities, perhaps too unreservedly. We hear them called "foul sinks of corruption" and "plague spots on our body politic."
Without self-complacency in the agent no generous enterprise is to be expected, and no train of voluntary actions, such as may purchase honour to the person engaged in them. But, beside this, there is no true and substantial happiness but for the self-complacent. "The good man," as Solomon says, "is satisfied from himself." The reflex act is inseparable from the constitution of the human mind.
He replied in the most natural and self-complacent style imaginable, "that he had been among his cousins, who were very poor; they had been delighted to see him; still more delighted with his good fortune; they had taken him to their arms; admired his equipments; one had begged for this; another for that" in fine, what with the poor devil's inherent heedlessness, and the real generosity of his disposition, his needy cousins had succeeded in stripping him of all his clothes and accoutrements, excepting the fig leaf with which he had returned to camp.
He looked clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his assiduous and self-complacent self-consciousness. He embraced his mother with enthusiasm. "How well you look!" he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, "How well everything looks!"
But if the surviving present bowed down to us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long portraits of the extinguished race one was a Holbein and looked them in their sidelong eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by that invincibly self-complacent expression.
"There certainly is no vanity in that remark," she said. "Now I can't imagine most of the men I know thinking that." "It's only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as self-complacent as any other man." They left Mrs. Sidney's together and Howard walked down the Avenue with her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon the air dazzling, intoxicating.
The past interests him mainly for the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good opinion, especially of the Goddess of Reason. He did not know what a terrible trial was preparing for this goddess and her self-complacent worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy of many.
And if the note struck seem sometimes too insistent, if the Industrious one be too sleek, too self-complacent, the prodigal too immersed in sensual folly and indulgence; if the blacks seem too black, and the whites too white, and those half-tones which accord the values of life be generally missing; if a more refined age demands a subtler analysis, a more artistic treatment, can we yet deny the truth and necessity of the eternal lesson?
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