Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to Unamuno’s own work.  His novels are created within.  They are—­and their author is the first to declare it so—­novels which happen in the kingdom of the spirit.  Outward points of reference in time and space are sparingly given—­in fact, reduced to a bare minimum.  In some of them, as for instance Niebla (1914), the name of the town in which the action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to any other provincial town of Spain.  Action, in the current sense of the word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their turn made, as it were, spiritual.  Thus a street, a river of colour for some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings, becomes in Unamuno (see Niebla) a loom where the passions and desires of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of daily life.  Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a standard of utmost simplicity.  So that, in fine, Unamuno’s novels, by eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between souls.

Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the creative furrow.  For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that the whole of their vitality burns into one passion.  If a somewhat fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdos, for instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony.  Joaquin Monegro, the true hero of his Abel Sanchez (1917), is the personification of hatred.  Raquel in Dos Madres[1] and Catalina in El Marques de Lumbria[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost barbarous, “maternities.”  Alejandro, the hero of his powerful Nada Menos que Todo un Hombre,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable, save by death.  Further still, in most if not all of his main characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after.  Here is, for instance, Abel Sanchez, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase of the story of Cain.  Joaquin Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been reading Byron’s poem, and writes in his diary:  “It was when I read how Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be also immortal my hatred.  ‘Have I a soul?’ I said to myself then.  ’Is this my hatred soul?’ And I came to think that it could not be otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body....  A corruptible organism could not hate as I hated.”