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Playing Up
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (February 17, 1912) : 26
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      There is in us a propensity for “playing up” that perpetually surprises us. To see one who has small knowledge of theatricals instinctively recognize a situation and utter the appropriate phrase is to feel a great embarrassment. The small fiend which causes the simpler mind to play up comes at real moments and lends a papier-mâché quality to the atmosphere. The type of person whom the small fiend likes best occupies a large stratum midway between those people too simple to be anything but real and those others at the top who are too real to be anything but simple. The type of person whom the small fiend likes best occupies a large stratum midway between those people too simple to be anything but real and those others at the top who are too real to be anything but simple. A large class of people who are too self-conscious not to catch themselves in time are exempt, as is the class that is too self-evident to see itself at all. Yet the most unlikely may without a moment’s notice be entrapped into quick utterance of the grotesquely effective remark, and when an inveterate player-up has had his emotions discounted by a spectator the player-up suddenly has a moment of reality, at which the spectator can but berate his cynicism and doubt if a belief in the small fiend is ever justified.
      The decency that prevents one from dissecting a person when he is down has left the small fiend long untalked-of. Yet it is precisely his appearing at moments when the intense pressure of circumstances might be expected to force people into naturalness that makes his reign of apt theatricalism so surprising. The quality of playing-up is an asset both ways; when unrecognized it impresses the beholders as its counterpart on the stage enthralls an audience, and, when recognized and assessed, its presence still has the power to make others feel so flatly foolish that they present all appearances of being cowed and acquiescent. There are some half-dozen situations which may be varied endlessly and some dozen characters arranged about these situations with conventional precision that are as stereotyped as Nature’s breeds and are acted under as automatically as though they were Nature’s laws. It does not need a knowledge of melodrama to make one melodramatic. It does not need a knowledge of melodrama to make one melodramatic. Some women are born with so nice an instinct for pasteboard attitudes that, though they were reared by hermits, they would speak and act on the first provocation as though they had been conceived in the brain of an impecunious stage-manager and produced at one of the cheaper theaters. For the quality to bob up at a serious moment in a quiet home is to inoculate all present, so that by suggestion a dramatic incident is brought about and simple folk assume by reflex action the character proper to them. If every one remains real almost any of life’s juxtapositions can be got through safely and perhaps with inner gain. But if one person introduces effective artificiality each ingredient of the situation becomes so subtly distorted that a dénouement may be forced by the automatic following of the steps that lead, in the theater, to a striking curtain.
      People without an inner life sufficiently strong to force the spring of natural expression, who yet have a taste for the diversion to be derived from the mechanisms of life, choose unconsciously to act excitingly when circumstances have not made them feel with sufficient strength to act without choice. As not the most despondent of pessimists would admit that theatrical conventions are based on human psychology, there remains but one alternative. People without an inner life sufficiently strong to force the spring of natural expression, who yet have a taste for the diversion to be derived from the mechanisms of life, choose unconsciously to act excitingly when circumstances have not made them feel with sufficient strength to act without choice. It is not this phase of the phenomenon at which one wonders. It is that the quickness and completeness with which it is done shows how unfailing their instinct for a situation is. One who might, from her experience and interest in such things, have recognized afterward the resemblance that particular moment in real life bore to the hackneyed glare of fiction is made to seem a dull laggard by the rather dull person’s rising on the instant in exactly the right manner and exclaiming in the perfect tone, keyed half a note too high, “I cannot bear this any longer.” She knows, of course, that she can bear it and every one else knows that she can, but that was the identical moment at which a persecuted heroine would have exclaimed in that way, and the result is far-reaching. The nerves of all present respond as though a delicate poison had been instilled into them, and every one acts against what she knows to be sensible and behaves quite as though she had said the relevant thing. If by any chance we do not respond it is not to shine in contrast, but to be compelled because of one’s personal peculiarity of make-up to appear at a great disadvantage. We feel and appear as one who has forgotten his lines at a thrilling moment and yet stubbornly and stupidly refuses either to improvise a fitting speech or to leave the stage. The player-up, though openly behaving in the most absurdly unreasonable manner, has all the merit of acting decoratively and interestingly. There may be a regret that the situation has not seen fit to provide horrors really adequate to the emotions which she was so capable of producing, but that is but to regret a weak play for a great actress; it does not in any way reflect on the powers of the actress.
      The sincerity of players-up is unassailable. They cannot even be made to seem ridiculous. If one attempts to topple them from their pinnacles one is but forced into the unattractive part of cruel tormentor, and they shine the more as misunderstood and patient possessors of sensibilities. Humor hurts almost all bubbles except those that can reflect its twinkling truth, but a player-up is immune from the devastation of humor. A player-up has the inspired wit to do nothing, and the small fiend inside, by dissipating reality, turns the humorists into a coarsely hooting rabble.
      In the end one’s admiration balances one’s stupefaction. To make so elaborate a repast with so few utensils is both artistic and thrifty. If one has the instinct for being dramatic one cannot be downed. One pale little man sounds a nebulous note, and the player-up contrives to build up about her the vibrating and langourous atmosphere of a hotly besieged beauty who lies awake at night distraught at the havoc she causes. Her very door as you pass it has a flourish and the heavy-footed maids tip-toe by. Genuine events might come to you and you would lack the knack to make them loom so tellingly. The small fiend is required. One cannot manage alone. He must be welcomed and then blankness and monotony will be turned into vague mystery and cryptic phrases of much portent will fall from one’s lips. They ought to make the speaker seem silly, but they never do — they only make every one else seem silly. If one has the instinct for being dramatic one cannot be downed.
 

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