Social clique

“ Against despising interests that are not our own, or graces which we have chosen to neglect, against the danger of satire, against the love or the fear of being thought singular, and, above all, against the petty pride of clique.
“I do not know which is the worst,” I remember her saying, “a religious clique, an intellectual clique, a fashionable clique, a moneyed clique, or a family clique. And I have seen them all.”
“Come, Mother,” said Eleanor, “you cannot persuade us you would not have more sympathy with the intellectual than the moneyed clique, for instance?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ If men live in crowds or in cliques, their life is that of crowds or of cliques, and is unprofitable both to themselves and to the community that should prosper by their loyal activity.
It is true that there are societies and clubs, but these also to a certain degree have been swamped in the rising tide of undergraduates. With freshman classes as large as those of to-day, the old social machinery becomes incapable of sifting the clubable from the less clubable, those who deserve recognition in the body of undergraduates from those who do not. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In the Augustan age criticism is cliquism. Belong to a clique and you are Horace or Tibullus. Belong to no clique and, of course, you are Bavius or Maevius. 'The Londoner' is the enemy of no man: it holds all men in equal contempt. But as, in order to amuse, it must abuse, it compensates the praise it is compelled to bestow upon the members of its clique by heaping additional scorn upon all who are cliqueless. Hit him hard: he has no friends."
"Ah," said the minstrel, "I believe that there is much truth in what you say. I never had a friend among the cliques. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Inwardly resolving to make Miss Patricia Doyle regret the speech she hid all annoyance under her admirable self-control and answered with smooth complacency:
"Your estimate of society, my dear Miss Doyle, is superficial."
"Don't I know it, then?" exclaimed Patsy. "Culture and breeding, similarity of taste and intellectual pursuits will always attract certain people and band them together in those cliques which are called 'social sets,' They are not secret societies; they have no rules of exclusion; congenial minds are ever welcome to their ranks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may be literally true, that the chief formation of a long-drawn social life is not the relation of authority and subordination between parts of the group, not the gradation of its members into classes, not the systems of sustaining, transporting or regulating organs, but certain ideals and standards, certain likes and dislikes, certain admirations and abhorrences become common to its members. Here then, I venture to suggest, is the ultimate test of association. The abiding of men in the same neighborhood without conflict is mere aggregation. ”

“ The society in which he lives, and which gives him his encouragement and support, has the limitations of a clique. Its encouragement is too conscious; its support too willful. Beyond a certain point its encouragement becomes indeed relaxing rather than stimulating, and the aspiring individual is placed in the situation of having most to fear from the inhabitants of his own household. His intellectual and moral environment is lukewarm. He is encouraged to be an individual, but not too much of an individual. ”

“ There will always be some people who will wish to wear a badge possessed by the few, who will wish to retire into an inner circle of common knowledge and common acquaintance where they are safe in feeling superior to those whom they keep outside as far as the choice lies with themselves. But these cliques, whatever each thinks of itself, will be forced to yield to the larger organizations of students both the control of affairs and the right to set the fashion in character and in social customs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In these strictures on overgrown parties, we would not, of course, be understood as intending to include the smaller social gatherings, where men and women do not, as they are prone to do in crowds, lose their sense of personal responsibility, in deporting themselves like rational beings; for such doubtless often lead to pleasing and instructive interchange of thought, and the cultivation of those little amenities of life which are scarcely less essential than the virtues themselves in the structure of good society. ”

“ Working men’s clubs
Working men, whether as individuals or, what is still more important, collectively, are now at liberty to criticize all the details, and even the general principles, of the social system under which they live; affecting, as it necessarily does, themselves more nearly than any other class. The remarkable eagerness lately shown by our people to form clubs, though there was no special motive for it, and no very marked enthusiasm, was a proof that the checks which had previously prevented this tendency from showing itself were quite unsuited to our times. ”

“ An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques, especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported. ”

“ People may be social—the family is an example of this—without being a crowd either in thought or action. Again a crowd—a mob is an example of this—may be distinctly antisocial, if we attach any ethical meaning to the term. Both the individual and society suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which to-day so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also—it is the same thing in other words, perhaps—the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds. ”

“ As those who take orders are not those having a special fitness for the priestly office, but those who hope to get livings; as legislators and public functionaries do not become such by virtue of their political insight and power to rule, but by virtue of birth, acreage, and class influence; so, the self-elected clique who set the fashion, do this, not by force of nature, by intellect, by higher worth or better taste, but solely by unchecked assumption. ”

“ People were sordid, and petty, and coarse-minded; and society—his little clique that he called society—possessed a painfully predominating element of snobs; men who had given him no notice before were pleased to be noticed now, and yet the lucky partnership was covertly commented upon as the freak of an old man in his dotage. He was suddenly successful, he had suddenly a certain prospect of wealth, he was suddenly bitter. ”

“ And this beautiful dream of socialism, where each shall work for the good of all, will never come about until fifty-one per cent of the adults shall abandon all exclusive friendships. Until that day arrives you will have cliques, denominations—which are cliques grown big—factions, feuds and occasional mobs.
Do not lean on any one, and let no one lean on you. The ideal society will be made up of ideal individuals. Be a man and be a friend to everybody. ”

“ Moreover the gradations of social rank thus originated in the upper circles reproduced themselves in the middle and lower strata of local society, which accordingly became subdivided into mutually exclusive cliques and sets. ”

“ The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it must remain a crowd in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas. Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt. They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their more fortunate neighbors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Self-love and social here look like the same; and in consulting the interests of a particular class, which are also your own, there is even a show of public virtue. He who is a captious, impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or coterie is immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no friend to regularity and order, as 'a pestilent fellow,' and one who is incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any department or undertaking. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”