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 Galdós, for
instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquín
Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sánchez_ (1917), is the
personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El
Marqués de Lumbría_[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 Sánchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
of the story of Cain. Joaquín 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