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Updated: May 10, 2025
It is a revolution that has come a thousand times, and must and will come again and again. When custom gets greater than man it must be broken. The ankylosis of artistic smugness is no new thing. In heart and taste and ambition Ary and the Little Mother were one. Madame Scheffer rejoiced in the revolt she saw in the air against the old and outgrown.
But the town, prosperous in spite of many changes of fashion, has completely lost any antique air it may ever have enjoyed, and now, in all the smugness of brick, quite realises the idea of a borough which at every election is for sale to the highest bidder. The principal manufacture is that of shoes for exportation.
The Peter Champneyses of the world challenge the ideal of commercial success by their utter inability to see in it the real reason for being alive, and the chief end of man. They are inimical to smugness and to complacent satisfaction. Naturally, safe and sane citizens resent this.
Vaguely, dimly, he saw that Miss Foster's tight-fitting bodice was the matter. Yes, there was something about that bodice, those teeth, that tongue, that hair, something about her, which seemed to challenge the whole system of his ideas, all his philosophy, self-satisfaction, seriousness, smugness, and general invincibility.
From the moment that he is graduated out of the cub reporter class, every writer who is worth his salt is forever at the crossroads, perplexed about the next turn. Nowhere is smugness of mind more deadly than in journalism. To progress you must forever scale more difficult ascents. The bruises of rebuffs and the wounds of injured vanity will heal quickly enough if you keep busy.
He would have sought her out simply from the instinct to protest against the smugness of Salem opinion. A fine sailor, and a master at twenty-two. A great one to carry sail; yet in the sixteen years of his commands he had had no more serious accident than the loss of a fore-topgallant mast or splitting a couple of courses.
"Don't be so sure about Vandewaters. Does he look flurried by these surroundings?" "No. He certainly has an air of contentment. It is, I suppose, the usual air of self-made Americans." "Go to London, E.C., and you will find the same, plus smugness. Now, Mr. Vandewaters has real power and taste too, as you will see. Would you think Mr. Stephen Pride a self-made man?"
A suburb will wake into momentary life to curb the liberal programmes of the school-board, or to vote against the establishment of a free library; a gross self-interest being thus the only variation of its apathy. It soon falls asleep again, dulled into torpor by the fumes of its own intolerant smugness. For much of this the element of family separation in suburban life is answerable.
He drew a fanciful picture, at which he shuddered in disgust, of the party next evening at Chatou. "Imagine going to Chatou, of all places! Like a lot of drapers after closing time! Upon my word, these people are sublime in their smugness; they can't really exist; they must all have come out of one of Labiche's plays!" The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot.
Some of them complained: "When you try to make love to her she laughs at you!" She wasn't really laughing at them. She was laughing at what she knew about life. Occasionally men now married, and living dully content in the prim suburban smugness of Pelham or New Rochelle, boasted of past friendship with her, wagging their heads doggishly. "Little Fuller! I used to know her well." They lied.
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