. For, indeed,
the drama depends for its due existence and conduct upon a system of
connivance and conspiracy, in which the audience, no less than the
actors, are comprehended. The makeshifts and artifices of the theatre
have to be met half-way, and indulgently accepted.

The stage could not live without its whispers, which, after all, are
only whispers in a non-natural sense. For that can hardly be in truth
a whisper, which is designed to reach the ears of some hundreds of
persons. But the "asides" of the theatre are a convenient and
indispensable method of revealing to the audience the state of mind of
the speaker, and of admitting them to his confidence. The novelist can
stop his story, and indulge in analytical descriptions of his
characters, their emotions, moods, intentions, and opinions; but the
dramatist can only make his creatures intelligible by means of the
speeches he puts into their mouths. So, for the information of the
audience and the carrying on of the business of the scene, we have
soliloquies and asides, the artful delivery of which, duly to secure
attention and enlist sympathy, evokes the best abilities of the
player, bound to invest with an air of nature and truth-seeming purely
fictitious and unreasonable proceedings.

But there are other than these recognised and established whispers of
the stage. Voices are occasionally audible in the theatre which
obviously were never intended to reach the public ear. The existence
of such a functionary as the prompter may be one of those things which
are "generally known;" but the knowledge should not come, to those who
sit in front of the curtain, from any exercise of their organs of
sight or of sound. To do the prompter justice, he is rarely visible;
but his tones, however still and small they may pretend to be,
sometimes travel to those whom they do not really concern. One of the
first scraps of information acquired by the theatrical student relates
to the meaning of the letters P.S. and O.P. Otherwise he might,
perhaps, have some difficulty in comprehending the apparently magnetic
attraction which one particular side of the proscenium has for so many
of our players. We say _our_ players advisedly, for the position of
the prompter is different on the foreign stage. Abroad, and, indeed,
during alien and lyrical performances in this country, he is hidden in
a sort of gipsy-tent in front of the desk of the conductor. The
accommodation provided for him is limi