You extract a single thread from the weaving of a carpet, and note its colour and its concatenations, but that gives you no faintest idea of the pattern of the carpet; and then you extract another, and another, but you are no nearer the design.
"The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife"
Edward Carpenter
Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held bad-heartedness was strength.
"Robert Louis Stevenson a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial"
Alexander H. Japp
It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment-artistic and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of phrase.
"Robert Louis Stevenson a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial"
Alexander H. Japp