In that case the audience must have lost an effective scene. The device discussed in this paragraph enabled the poet to circumvent the unities and place the scene before his audience; and the convention which I have mentioned preserved it for them in its entirety. We have seen that the unities of time and place are largely due to the striving for illusion in a theater comparatively bare of scenery and of facilities for scene-shifting. Conversely, their observance in the modern theater with its ample scenic provision would naturally militate against the scenic extravagance and actualism of which the present-day theatocracy is so enamored. Thus it would seem that the much-abused unities are not without a meaning and truly artistic tendency even today, for some of the most significant influences in contemporaneous staging are directed against excesses along these lines. Even a modern producer, Henry W. Savage, included the following in his advice to a young playwright: “Do not distribute your scenes so widely that you have one on an island, another at Herald Square, and a third at Chicago. Make the action of your play take place all in one day, if possible”[330]—in other words the unity of time expressly and an approximation to the unity of place. Ibsen surely retained no theatrical conventions merely because they were old; yet he usually observed the unities. A recent critic has written: “Though the unities of time and place were long ago exploded as binding principles—indeed, they never had any authority in English drama—yet it is true that a broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may be all very well in melodrama and romance, but scarcely in higher and more serious types of drama.”[331] The unity of action is the only one that is universal, since it alone springs from the inmost nature of the drama. Yet even here local conditions make themselves felt. The modern playwright, free (if he pleases and has a producer complaisant enough) to change the scene ten times within a single act and with superior facilities for motivating entrances and exits, delights in shifting different sets of characters back and forth and thus secures an alternation of light and shade, an intermingling of comedy and tragedy quite beyond the ancient dramatist’s reach. The preceding discussion has shown the immobility of the ancient theater in these respects and, consequently, one reason why the Greeks ruthlessly excluded everything that was not strictly germane to their action (see also p. 201, above).