women are no less living and no less distinctive than his men; and he
sinks his individuality at all times enough to interest us in the
characters which are not akin to his own as much as in those which are.
Even if it were otherwise, if his men and women were all variations of
himself, as imagined under differences of sex, of age, of training, or
of condition, he would still be dramatic in this essential quality, the
only one which bears on our contention: that everything which, as a
poet, he thinks or feels, comes from him in a dramatic, that is to say,
a completely living form.

It is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the
metaphysical. The abstract, no less than the practical questions which
shape themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and
words, in the character and conduct of his men and women. This does not
mean that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can
be made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it:
for in that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not
metaphysical; it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot
be given in a picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it.
He accepts this residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called
Divine Thought. Thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of
existence; the one thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which
we can never get behind. His gospel would begin, "In the beginning was
the Thought;" and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his
"Alpha and Omega" is a Divine intelligence from which all the ideas of
the human intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true. These
religious conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the
metaphysical activity of his poetic genius. The two are blended in the
vision of a Supreme Being not to be invested with human emotions, but
only to be reached through them.