The same reasoning reveals the shortcoming in Professor Lounsbury’s contention: “What, indeed, is the objection to this mixture of the serious and the comic in the same play? By it is certainly represented, as it is not in pure comedy or pure tragedy, the life we actually live and the mingled elements that compose it.... As there was no question that sadness and mirth were constantly intermixed in real life, it was impossible to maintain that the illegitimacy of this form of dramatic composition was due to its improbability.”[337] The word “pure” gives away the whole case. Aristotle would have to grant that Shakespeare’s plays are admirable, even sublime; but he could hardly admit that they were “pure” tragedies or “pure” comedies, however legitimate in other respects. They fall short in the quality which Mr. Albert H. Brown placed in the forefront of his definition: “A great drama is a _clearly focused_ picture of human conditions.” Aristotle also pointed out that epic poetry has an advantage in that it can present many events simultaneously transacted, while the drama is restricted to but one.[338] A curious violation of this self-evident principle occurred in a recent American play. Toward the end of Act II in Eugene Walter’s _Paid in Full_, Emma Brooks is disclosed making an appointment with Captain Williams over the telephone. In the next act we are transferred to Captain Williams’ quarters, and the dramatic clock has in the meanwhile been turned back some fifteen minutes, for presently the telephone bell rings and the same appointment is made over again. In other words, Act III partially overlaps Act II in time, but the scene is different. It can scarcely be denied that the dramatic situation has been enhanced by this device, but this gain has been secured at the sacrifice of verisimilitude and dramatic illusion. Such “cut-backs” may be all very well in moving pictures, but they hardly have a place in spoken drama. Thus, the Greek masters were so far from evolving unities out of their inner consciousness or from observing them invariably that they constantly violated the unities of time and place in both letter and spirit. Their practice throughout simply reacted to theatrical conditions as they found them. It has remained for their successors, whose theater has for the most part been quite dissimilar, to observe the unities with a literalness and exactness such as never characterized the great dramatists of Greece. That both ancients and moderns have produced masterpieces under these restrictions is, of course, beyond dispute. In fact, some of our most impressive plays of recent date such as Kennedy’s _Servant in the House_, have conformed to them. That many modern plays would have been improved by observing them is doubtless also true. Even so uncompromising an admirer of Shakespeare as Professor Lounsbury[339] wrote: