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SOUND EFFECTS
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other people from hearing him. So far so good. But there is much that a whisper can tell beside that. And it does not emerge from the printed page.
Now we are in a theater. Now we are watching the great play, The Shellac King, which is the dramatic version of this same wonderful story. The curtain rises, and we see the svelte and haughty Ethelbert slinking up through a maze of coat hooks to the rear of Bettina and inserting a stage whisper into her ear. What effect is now produced? You know, of course, that a stage whisper is no whisper at all. It is something else again. It is a very peculiar and special noise. The genuine whisper cannot be used on the stage, if the whispered words are to be understood by the audience. The world’s greatest whisperer could not be heard beyond the second row of seats. A first-class stage whisper is a noise a little bit like a bad cold in the throat. Technically speaking, it is a symbolic noise. It stands for whispering, although it really isn’t, and we come to accept it as such just as we come to accept the printed word on the page as meaning whispering. Now, to be sure, the stage whisper is vastly more successful than the printed word in arousing in us feelings such as those which a genuine whisper conveys. But it falls far short of the realistic effect of a whisper as reproduced in a good sound picture. You can hear a real whisper in talking pictures as far away as the last row of the balcony, and it is a whisper to everybody in the audience.
Study the effects of sound in slapstick and farce comedy. Listen to the noises of the gas range, the crash of dishes breaking on tile, the shrill scold of the nagging harpy, the downward trend of the hero as he falls three