to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The
dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest
of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical
inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the
novel and the poem.

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 unconquerab