To the suggestion sometimes expressed by his well-wishers that he should withdraw from the arena in order to devote himself more exclusively to poetry and philosophy, Unamuno would reply that this poetry and philosophy are simply the outcome of his intense, energetic and passionate living. If he had never known the dangers, the ardours, the hopes and despairs of battle, his poetry might have withered for lack of roots. _Primum vivere, deinde philosopari_--the philosopher must first live before he can philosophize. And the end of life, Unamuno has said, is living, not understanding. Nothing is more repugnant to his spirit than the conception of æsthetics embodied in the catch-phrase, “art for art’s sake.” The idea that letters can be separated from life and literature produced _in vacuo_ is inconceivable to one whose impulse to write springs directly from his zeal to affect and mould life. Unamuno provides yet another corroboration of Tchekov’s maxim that all great writers have axes to grind. If the object of Unamuno’s political opponents in banishing him from the society of his fellows to the ocean-girt desert of Fuerteventura was to reduce his spirit to submission, they little knew the man they had to deal with. He has never overprized the amenities of civilization and it is probable that he would have felt much more in exile if he had been condemned to live in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Tenerife or Las Palmas. The Canaries have been identified with the Fortunate Isles of the ancient world, and Unamuno remarked humorously that Fuerteventura was indeed fortunate among islands in being one where there were no hotels _de luxe_, no bull-fights, no cinemas, no football, no boy-scouts. But apart from its lack of the more futile expedients for killing time, there is something in the spirit and even in the structure of this stern and naked island that was in harmony with Unamuno’s temperament. It is, as he phrased it, not merely _desnudo_ but _descarnado_, not merely without vesture but without flesh. Like a bleached skeleton in the sun, it reveals every articulation of its structure. In its landscape everything fugitive gives place to what is enduring and elemental; it bears the impress of eternity rather than of time. Living in this austere but serene ambience, between the mountains and the sea, Unamuno found a refreshment of mental and spiritual energy, the activity of his inner life was perhaps never more intense and what he wrote during his four months’ exile was quarried from those deeper strata of his spirit where thought and passion lie embedded in a single matrix.