Clique

“ Every man who has had anything to do with communal life has noticed that the clique is the disintegrating bacillus—and the clique has its rise always in the exclusive friendship of two persons of the same sex, who tell each other all unkind things that are said of each other—"so be on your guard." Beware of the exclusive friendship! Respect all men and try to find the good in all. To associate only with the sociable, the witty, the wise, the brilliant, is a blunder—go among the plain, the stupid, the uneducated, and exercise your own wit and wisdom. ”

“ Indeed, they combined the artistic clique and the family clique in equal proportions. From the conversation at their table you would have imagined that there was but one standard of good for poor humanity, that of one ‘school’ of one art, and absolutely no one who quite came up to it but the brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, or connections by marriage of your host. Now, I honestly assure you that the only other man really like this one that I ever met, was what is called a ‘self-made’ man in a commercial clique. ”

“ But they are also the thing which keeps talent small and parochial once they have helped it to grow. The clique is the nursery, and the test of a man is whether he knows when he is grown up. The art clique is like journalism, which can lead you anywhere provided you forsake it. ”

“ They foment each other, and their sympathy dilutes sanity—by recognizing their troubles men make them real. Things get out of focus, and the sense of values is lost. By thinking some one is an enemy you evolve him into one.
Soon others are involved and we have a clique. A clique is a friendship gone to seed.
A clique develops into a faction, and a faction into a feud, and soon we have a mob, which is a blind, stupid, insane, crazy, ramping and roaring mass that has lost the rudder. In a mob there are no individuals—all are of one mind, and independent thought is gone. ”

“ You will see that the critics will make no allusion whatever to the enthusiasm of the audience, and that the numerous encores will not even be mentioned!"
"That is unfair," said Alwyn quickly. "The expression of the people's appreciation should always be chronicled."
"Of course!—but it never is, unless it suits the immediate taste of the cliques. Clique-Art, clique-Literature, clique-Criticism, keep all three things on a low ground that slopes daily more and more toward decadence. ”

“ The clique which had rated his reticence stingy was eager to believe. They needed no persuading. So no throngs gathered round him any more. Those who had fawned passed by on the far side of the street, lest crudely he recall past accommodations. And, passing, they smiled. And the public, that public to which a world's champion was something picturesque at which to crane the neck, if they recognized him at all now, had to concentrate to remember what it was that they had read lately about him. ”

“ At the time of which we tell there was no greater joy to those in each of the many cliques than to be able to stare at those who belonged to a clique esteemed lower, and to ask who those people were, and profess never to have heard their names, and to wonder out of what dungheap they had sprung. ”

“ But when they come together in a clique they come sneakishly, eschewing all change or disagreement, though it is to dine to a brass band in a big London hotel. For birds of a feather flock together, but birds of the white feather most of all. ”

“ He was surrounded by an adoring clique, and reminded one of the dignitaries satirized by Sydney Smith: "They live in high places with high people, or with little people who depend upon them. They walk delicately, like Agag. They hear only one sort of conversation, and avoid bold, reckless men, as a lady veils herself from rough breezes." ”

“ The Clique were buying wheat—Page & Company were selling it to them: if it should come out, on the thirty-first of December, that Page & Company had sold more than they could deliver, the Clique would be winners; but if it should have been delivered, to the last bushel, the corner would be broken, and the Clique would drop from sight as so many reckless men had dropped before. The readers of every great newspaper in the country were watching Page & Company. ”

“ How often does the stranger, the guest, sit in helpless agony in your circle (all of whom know each other) at table or in the drawing-room, isolated and separate, because all the talk is local and personal, about your little world, and the affairs of your clique, and your petty interests, in which he or she cannot possibly join? ”

“ When the clique evil is fully developed, snobbishness and false standards run rife.
There must be democracy in the school if the best results are to be obtained, and the clique spirit may work great havoc, especially in a small high school where a well-defined group or clique is necessarily very conspicuous.
CASE 133 (HIGH SCHOOL)
Sororities A high school of about 150 pupils in a prosperous little western town became afflicted with the clique disease. ”

“ Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership, or a political party. ”

“ Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. ”

“ They have clubs, you know, to improve things, but there's nothing to improve. We had a social war recently over a button. One clique wanted a club emblem that would cost a dollar and a half, while the other faction were in favor of a dollar button. I tell you, it was serious. Then, too, we're all tagged and labelled like cans of salmon with the price-mark on—we can't four-flush. You can tell a man's salary by the number of rocking-chairs in his house, and the wife of a fellow who draws eighteen hundred a year can't associate with a woman whose husband makes twenty-five hundred. ”

“ For instance, when the classical lion of a certain clique had been favourably reviewed by a gentleman in another city, whose opinion was supposed to be worth something, the periodical organ of the clique publicly expressed its thanks for the favour, and in return, dug up a buried novel of the critic's, and did its best to resuscitate it by a vigorous puff. Here was a fair business transaction with prompt payment. We have observed that the tendency of American reviewing is to indiscriminate praise. ”

“ Professionals move, as a rule, in petty cliques; city people find their interests clash too much for them to associate in such harmony as do those engaged in Government offices. They may be said, certainly, to form a clique, and to have strong party interests also; but then, their clique is so large a one that the prominent features of narrow-mindedness and utter selfishness, which distinguish smaller coteries, are lost in its more extended circle ”

“ We are going to be apart from all cliques and sets——"
"I see——" interrupted Peter, "be an anti-clique clique."
"Not at all," said Martha Proctor. "We aren't going to call ourselves anything or have meetings in an A.B.C. shop or anything of the kind. It is possible that there—there'll be a paper one day—a jolly kind of paper that will admit any sort of literature if it's good of its kind; not only novels about introspective women and poems about young men's stomachs on a spring morning. ”

“ But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. ”

“ Some few there were of the delegates present, hailing from amateur clubs, who manfully battled against the ruling clique for the interests of the amateur class of the fraternity, but they finally had to succumb, and all of these retired in disgust from the farce in which they had been involuntary participants. It was well for the general interests of the fraternity, however, that matters should have taken the course they did, or otherwise we should have had to suffer the infliction of another like convention. ”

“ A coterie is a small company of persons of similar tastes, who meet frequently in an informal way, rather for social enjoyment than for any serious purpose. Clique has always an unfavorable meaning. A clique is always fractional, implying some greater gathering of which it is a part; the association breaks up into cliques. ”

“ But it looks now as though we should have to organize a new clique—the Young Roughnecks. The Young Intellectuals are too easily pleased with themselves. In the first place, we honestly believe that few men have any real critical balance and judgment before they are forty. In the second place, the Young Intellectuals are perilously devoid of humour. ”

“ That clique are proceeding, in regard to everything, in a reckless and very insolent manner, and without any caution, for there is no one who can resist them; and therefore they have rendered themselves formidable in this country, and the arbitrators of all matters. ”

“ If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual or possibly an isolated clique. ”

“ The party assembled in the drawing-room was very animated, while in the boudoir adjoining, where persons were moving in and out, the hostess, her friend, Fürstenberg, and other members of the clique were talking business. ”

“ As was to be expected among a hundred people confined in two small streets, innumerable cliques were formed, from each of which ripples of gossip spread outward until they merged into and were overwhelmed by another eddy of gossip. ”

“ Children, as well as adults, choose for friends persons of the same or similar tastes, but in a small school the grouping of these kindred spirits into an exclusive organization is particularly bad, because there are usually not enough other pupils with the spirit and initiative to form rival organizations; there is usually one clique only, which excludes the majority of the school from its ranks, instead of several which offset each other. ”

“ The Clique Club was a post-Prohibition institution of New York, run in direct, more or less open, and famously successful defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. One had to become a member in order to obtain admission, or else be introduced as the guest of a member; and the initiation fee was something wholly dependent on one's rating in the esteem of the Membership Committee, whose powers had been delegated en bloc to an urbane brigand, the club steward, Theodore by name: in more humid days the more than ordinarily supercilious, courted and successful maître-d'hotel of a fashionable restaurant. ”

“ We have so long groaned under the despotism of cliques, who, from self-interested motives, have not hesitated to cram ridiculous notions down the public throat, that we are determined now to combat this. ”

“ A country-house party occasionally resolves itself into two or more cliques, as far as the ladies are concerned; gentlemen, as a rule, are not much given to this sort of thing. On the first evening, as soon as the ladies have left the dining-room for the drawing-room, these little cliques are tacitly formed, and continue unbroken until the close of the visit. There are many reasons which call these cliques into existence—old intimacies revived, new acquaintanceships to be strengthened, unwelcome acquaintanceships to be avoided, and so on. ”

“ For this was the wisdom of the Club, and herein lay its immense superiority over every other log-rolling club, that whereas in those childish cliques every man is expected to admire every other, or to say so, in the Mutual Depreciation Society the obligation was all the other way. Every man was bound by the rules to sneer at the work of his fellow-members and, if he should happen to admire any of it, at least to have the grace to keep his feelings to himself. ”

“ When a thousand or two live as a single community and dine at one board (let us call it dining) , the social bond relaxes. Next door neighbors are unknown to one another, having no common ground of meeting, and even the college commons fail to bring them together. The relaxing influence of the hour spent 260 at table and in the subsequent conversation, during which social intercourse should most freely flourish, is quite lost. The undergraduate body is a mob, or at best an aggregation of shifting cliques. ”

“ Secondly, it will happen, and not seldom, that the frequent meeting together of a number of people, necessarily restricted, instead of enlarging the social horizon of the individual, will tend to narrow it more and more, so that sets and cliques will revolve around small centres of interest, and refuse to extend their scope. ”

“ All through society this abnegation of individuality weaves its web. Nor is the effect circumscribed to the frivolous and weak. Men think in cliques. It is intolerable to some to be out of fashion with the political opinion of their set. ”