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EWPEOPLETODAY under the age of fifty are like-ly to have heard of Frank Underhill, unless theyhave studied Canadian history or politics. Thesame goes for the political party with which he was longassociated, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation(Farmer, Labour, Socialist), and its founding platformdocument, the Regina Manifesto, which he drafted in933. Members of the New Democratic Party, whichrew out of the CCF in its last days in 1961, might in thiscase be among the exceptions. When I was a graduatetudent at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s,where Underhill had made his name as a thinker and his-torian, his reputation had already begun to fade in theyears since his departure in 1955.It didn픀t help that, in the latter decades of his life (hedied in 1971 at the age of 81), he abandoned his socialistprinciples, or so it seemed, and embraced the Liberalismof William Lyon MacKenzie King and Lester Pearson,and that he stood firmly on the side of the United Statesduring the Cold War. This was not a posture that wone have entered anentirely new era. Sic transit gloria mundi theless, Underhill was unquestionably theleading public intellectual of English-speaking Canada inhe first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in thelate 1920s and continuing almost to the time of his death,he wrote hundreds of essays and reviews, primarily inthe Canadian Forum , of which he was editor briefly in930s, but also in the w Statesman , the , and Saturday Night , in the university quarterlies, in the dailypress, and in other journals of opinion Ñ journals, inther words, very like this one, but in the medium ofprint. He reviewed books on the CBC and, in 1963,delivered the Massey Lectures, later published as Image of Confederation All this was in addition to the work he published in aca-demic journals like the Canadian Historical Review , in essaycollections, and as introductions and forewords to reprints,anthologies, and other books. A constant of his thought andwriting Ñ perhaps their single most consistent theme Ñ washis contention that Canadian public life had been dimin-ished and constrained by the absence of an indigenous intel-lectual tradition. No one did more to remedy the deficien-cy. If writers from Hilda Neatby and George Grant to MarkKingwell and Naomi Klein have since found a wide audi-ence it is at least partly because Underhill paved the way.The chief medium of his intellectual engagement wasthe essay, a form that in UnderhillÕs time had lost some ofthe dynamism and authority it had achieved in its nine-teenth-century heyday. It experienced something of arevival in the late twentieth century and, after a long hia-tus, has recently attracted the attention of literary critics.Books have appeared studying the essay, as have essays Ñys on the essay,Ó to quote the title of one collection997 Fitzroy Dearborn, the British publisher ofdictionaries and encyclopedias of just about everythinghe sun, brought out an clopedia of the Essay title perhaps verging on the oxymoron. Everyone interest-ed in how writing works should be pleased by this. It wassomewhat odd that a genre so widely used in so many dif-ferent forums and over so long a period Ñ the sixteenth-century French humanist Michel de Montaigne was itsinventor Ñ should have been so little studied during theera of the New Criticism in literary studies.UnderhillÕs attraction to the essay was rooted in hispre-World War I origins, which also shaped much of hisfville, north ofniversity College in theUniversity of Toronto from 1907 to 1911 and Balliolom 1911 to 1914. He was in his firstacademic post, at the University of Saskatchewan, as thear began and left it a year later to enlist for service over-seas. He was then twenty-five years old, fundamental ele-ments of his habits and outlook having been formed inthe refined milieu of middle-class Edwardian Ontarioh later, he reminisced, with character-istic gentle irony, that Òhe or she who was not born soonenough to grow up in that delectable quarter centuryore 1914 can never know what the sweetness of life is.팀It is hard not to think that beneath the irony lay anexperience of the twentieth century Ñ of warfare, depres-sion, and social upheaval; of fascism, communism, andthe cult of the masses Ñ as a kind of Fall. ÒMost history,팀the American critic George Steiner has written, Òseems tocarry on its back vestiges of paradise,Ó and this wouldseem to have been true for Underhill.In that sweet Edwardian Indian summer, political dis-putation, social commentary, and even history itself werethe province of gentlemen scholars, sages, and moralists,and one of their chief instruments of discourse was theessay, whose diffusion had been made possible by therise and proliferation of periodical journals and maga-zines. Underhill read widely, not to say voraciously, in the Frank Underhill: The Historian as Essayist Kenneth C. Dewar literature and commentary of the day. As a high schoolstudent, he was much taken with Leslie Stephen, nowetter known as the father of Virginia Woolf than as oneof the pre-eminent essayists and Ômen-of-lettersÕ of lateVictorian England. At university, his studies Ñ honoursclassics, English and history at Toronto, ÔGreatsÕ andmodern history at Oxford Ñ provided him as fine a lib-eral arts education as he might have received anywherein the English-speaking world, but it was an education asa generalist and quite unlike the specialized professionaltraining in historical research that was then taking over atPrinceton and Harvard, and was established at Berlinand the Sorbonne. It was also an education that stimulat-ed his interest in political ideas and cultivated his prosestyle. Douglas Francis, UnderhillÕs biographer, tells usthat one of his Oxford tutors admired his weekly papersfor their Òwitty prose and epigrammatic remarks.팀Wit and a well-turned phrase were to become thehallmarks of an Underhill essay. They were especially evi-dent in the short pieces he wrote for Canadian Forum column entitled ÒO Canada,Ó which ran from 1929 to1932. ÒAll these European troubles,Ó he wrote in July1929, referring particularly to Canadian involvement inthe League of Nations and what it implied for the nation픀sforeign commitments, Óuntil we have more investmentsthere, are not worth the bones of a Toronto grenadier.팀This was typical Underhill: provocative, a bit flip, andone. There was nothing ideal-tic, he was saying, about Canada픀s membership in theLeague, since Canadian politicians would never act unlesse were domestic political advantages to be had, andforeign relations, in any case, were driven by businesscutting the idea of any involvement at allwas the sentence픀s buried lead, Òthe bones of a Torontogrenadier,Ó evoking the lives of young men wasted in thet European war only a dozen years earlier.y segued into another favoritesubject, the baffling (to him) resistance of Canadians toacknowledging their close kinship with Americans: ÒOnthe subject of Americanism the ordinary Canadianbehaves like a fundamentalist discussing modernism.팀UnderhillÕs isolationism and his North Americanism (andtheir corollary, anti-British imperialism) were controver-sial positions, and the sharpness with which he laid themout infuriated his enemies and delighted his friends,though they occasionally aroused concern that he need-lessly exposed himself (and his friends) to criticism.His longer, more formal pieces had the same lighttouch. In 1927, he made his first serious foray intoCanadian political history with a paper for the CanadianHistorical Association on the radicalism of the Toronto in the decade before Confederation. He lost no timein establishing his iconoclastic purpose. Historians, het enough to ideas and Ôatmosphere.픀 Thetion that Òour Canadiana dictum that he came frequently to quote and that he laterclaimed to have first heard as an undergraduate fromaurice Hutton, one of his classics professors. Even then,he told his readers, he had felt a thrill of appreciation.He proceeded to argue that the (and its editor,George Brown) had been the voice, not primarily of anti-Catholic bigotry, as was then widely believed, but ofUpper Canadian agrarian democracy. Editorials criticizedbig business, in the form of the Grand Trunk Railway,extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer standingfoursquare on the soil, called for the opening of the NorthWest to settlement, and saw better than most the nationalpotential of Confederation. All of this had relevance forthe present. ÒWe of the modern West,Ó he concluded (hewas then still at Saskatchewan, though about to move toToronto), Òhave a natural affinityÓ with George Brown픀sUpper Canada: ÒIt is our spiritual home.팀Leaving aside whatever might be made of this pur-ported regional affinity for our own present, what strikesthe modern reader of this academic paper is its discur-sive qualities: its personal voice, its relative informality, itsmanner of directly addressing the reader. These areamong the distinguishing qualities of the essay mode,though the line between personal and impersonal is noteasily drawn, nor is it obvious in just what an essa秕sinformality consists or where relative informality shadesinto relative formality.hat the articles thatnals today are not essays, gener-ally speaking, even though they are similar in length andve essayistic qualities. Two of their mostcommon features make them something else, perhapsy: one is their elaborate schol-arly apparatus and the other is their scientific or quasi-sci-entific detachment. The two are closely related, ofse, since scientific (or science-like) credibility restshe quality of an author픀s study andresearch, and footnotes (or endnotes) enable the readerto check the author픀s sources, at least in theory, and tojudge whether he or she has used them honestly anddrawn legitimate conclusions. In UnderhillÕs day, scholar-ly papers in general had many fewer notes than today, amark of their embeddedness in an earlier humanist tradi-tion, and of the limited degree to which historical studyhad yet been professionalized. Academic journals werethemselves in their infancy.The academic article of today also tends to suppressthe personal voice, whereas the essay is an expression ofvoice more than anything else. UnderhillÕs academicwork was almost all manifestly , no less than was hissocial commentary. There were exceptions, among themhis articles on the personal and political relationsbetween Edward Blake, the brilliant and temperamentalilfrid Laurier, Blake픀s close associate before he becameeports onor a biography of Blake Ñ a 2007 biographyhe long wrestled with, but failed to completeÑ and comprised, in large part, long quotations from theorrespondence between the two men.Otherwise, there was usually no mistakingUnderhillÕs opinionated presence in everything he wrote.Offering an assessment of the liberal nationalist writerJohn S. Ewart, in another paper presented to theCanadian Historical Association, this time in 1933, heacknowledged Ewart픀s reputation as a purveyor of death-less prose in his numerous analyses of Canada픀s constitu-tional evolution. The Ottawa had written, on theoccasion of Ewart픀s death a few months earlier, that onlypedants and professors had read him. ÒPerhaps one likemyself,Ó Underhill slyly responded, Òwho is both apedant and a professor, is apt, therefore, to overestimatehis influence.Ó By passages such as this Ñ and they arescattered throughout his work Ñ he signalled that what hewrote was not to be taken as standing separate from him-self, a contribution to knowledge resting on an evidentialbase, but as the expression of his personal point of view. It was also a point of view self-consciously sceptical ofauthority and offered from the margins of the very aca-demic structures of which he was himself a member.Ewart, in fact, had not found favour among Òthe profes-sors,Ó who had either ignored him or attacked him; mean-while, Canadian constitutional development, as shown bythe recent passage of the Statute of Westminster, had fol-aced out, rather than thatecommended by his more imperially-minded critics. ÒInthe ultimate analysis,Ó Underhill concluded, Òit is becauseart, like the great bulk of his fellow-countrymen,was so sturdy a North American in his outlook upon life,e felt themselvesas mere sojourners in an outpost of European civilization,that he and the professors have never been able to appre-e one another.Ó Underhill thus aligned himself, notart, but with the bulk of Canadians, as hesaw them, and against Òthe professors,Ó who were clearlyless in touch with their fellow citizens than the drilypedantic Ottawa lawyer.In taking such a position in relation to Ewart, or insimilarly adopting the 픀s ÔradicalismÕ of the 1850s ashis own, he was not rejecting objectivity as a methodolog-ical principle so much as not considering it at all. His sub-jects Ñ Ewart only recently having died, the eal ancestor of the western farmersÕ movements, GoldwinSmith, the Victorian essayist and historian in whom hewas also interested, and even Blake, the closest thing toan intellectual to be found among Canadian politicalleaders Ñ were all contemporary in some sense, and theirhistories living and present to Underhill in only a slightlylesser degree than the League of Nations.This sense of the past in the present was nowhere 픀s Quarterly 932 on the ideas and influ-eformer Jeremyy and wellinto the twentieth, BenthamÕs philosophy of utilitarianismwas closely identified with a cold and narrow individual-sm and unremitting hostility to any form of state inter-vention. Using the one hundredth anniversary of hisdeath as an occasion, Underhill began by wonderingwhether the received version was really the last word. Heshowed how BenthamÕs principles and underlyingassumptions, and their internal tensions, had led him toa belief in both egalitarian democracy and the adminis-tration of experts, and he surveyed the reforms in poorrelief, public health, and education that Benthamites hadhelped to enact.Far from blindly opposing state action, Benthamismhad eased Ñ had perhaps made possible Ñ the transitionto collectivism in late nineteenth-century England, with-out sacrificing belief also in individualism. Thus Ñ andhere was the lesson to which the reader has been led inthe gentlest possible manner Ñ Benthamism, suitablyadapted to the needs of the present, might serve as a bul-wark against the insidious worship of the state manifest incontemporary Italian fascism and Russian communism. An Underhill essay, then, and the essay form in gen-eral, differs from the academic article in its internalrhetorical practices as well as in its lack (or lower level)of scholarly apparatus. A final distinguishing feature liesin their different ordering principles. The academic arti-cle typically follows what one modern critic, Paul Heilker,m.Ó It presents an argument,shals the evidence for and confronts the evidenceagainst, and arrives at a conclusion, the whole constitut-ernally consistent linear unit. Itassumes a more-or-less positivist epistemology, in whichevealed and explained by theauthor, according to principles implicit in the scientific orquasi-scientific procedures I referred to above. TheysÕ that university professors assign their studentsanized in this way Ñ at least, so their stu-dents are instructed Ñ which has confused discussion ofthe essay form in some small degree. The form that stu-dent essays actually imitate is that of the scholarly articleand they, too, are expected to stand independently oftheir authors.The essay form as it has been practised sinceMontaigne is much more open-ended and free-flowing,one thought leading to another, not haphazardly, but inthe way we mean when we talk about following (or los-ing) our train of thought, as in UnderhillÕs segue from theLeague of Nations to Canadian attitudes towards theUnited States, or in his coming to the main point ofÒBentham and BenthamismÓ only on the last page. Thesame thing happens in many of his historical papers andis reflected in their titles Ñ ÒSome Aspects of UpperCanadian Radical Opinion in the Decade beforeormers 1867-1878,Ó ÒSome Reflections on the Liberaly run out its string, and winds up with a quotation from what was evidentlyhis latest reading, usually an American historian writingbout the United States (Carl Becker, Charles Beard,Arthur Schlesinger Jr.). These are all typically essayistictextual orderings Ñ irregular, inconclusive, lateral, andfluid Ñ the effect of which is to represent a personal andprovisional understanding of its subject, even to implythat the author was a part of its subject.The ease of UnderhillÕs prose is not to be exaggerat-ed or misconstrued. He did not write ÔfamiliarÕ essays, amode which had flowered in the nineteenth century butrun its course by the inter-war period, when its leisurelymanner and self-consciously artful style had become endsin themselves. Virginia Woolf, who contributed substan-tially to the essa秕s renewal, believed that it had deterio-rated in the Edwardian period, becoming more a vehicleof self-display than self-expression. One imagines its idealreader to have been a gentleman in a smoking jacket, sit-ting in his library and sucking on his pipe. This was cer-tainly not the reader of an Underhill essay, which wasdesigned to disturb complacency, not to reinforce it.Woolf, in imagining her own audience, and that of essaysin general, resurrected the idea of the Ôcommon reader픀first put forward by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenthcentury, in part to affirm the professional writer픀s inde-pendence of old forms of patronage and his preferredreliance on a commercial market., as described by Elenai, a critic of her essay-writing, was an idealizedreading public composed of interested amateurs ratherher professionals, on the one hand, or the penny-dreadful masses, on the other. Similarly, the reading pub-as educated, or willing tobe so, and singular: the readers of Canadian Forum Queen픀s Quarterly, and the CHR were not all that differentom each other. Today, when observers (especially crit-holarswho Ôcould writeÕ and whom ÔeveryoneÕ could read, for-get that the definition of ÔeveryoneÕ has changed in thepast fifty years.UnderhillÕs essays, regardless of venue, were seriousin purpose if also contentious and frequently sardonic intone. His rhetorical models were George Bernard Shawand H.L Mencken. He did not offer up problems toexplore so much as conventionalities and myths to punc-ture. In first writing (in 1935) about the history of politi-cal parties in Canada Ñ a subject he made his own overthe course of his career Ñ he set out to clear away pre-tension and obfuscation. There were two possible viewsof party, he said: one was materialist (parties representedinterests), and the other was idealist (parties embodiedcontesting principles). The first had been clearlyexpressed by James Madison at the time of the makingederalist Paper, the second murkily articulated byathering in 1928.among other things, that while Canadian parties hadadopted British names, Canadians fooled themselves ifhey thought their two main parties anything but funda-mentally North American in nature.While in some measure all historical study character-istically proceeds by seeking to reveal something of a sub-ject previously misunderstood, unnoticed, or obscured byaccumulated detritus (rather than, say, to theorize abouta general phenomenon), Underhill did so always with aneye on present conditions and circumstances, and theforce of his argument about the past was heightened byits relevance to the present.In this he was not unique, of course, and other his-torians, especially those who disagreed, responded inkind. The practice of Canadian history as a whole wasthen deeply engaged with the fate of the nation, to anextent that precluded the pursuit of objectivity that laterbecame a professional ideal. A.R.M. Lower, an exactcontemporary of UnderhillÕs, introduced his GovernorGeneralÕs Award-winning survey of Canadian history, Colony to Nation (1946), with the hope that it would leadCanadians to the Òself-knowledgeÓ required for maturityand contentment. ÒCertainly on no one,Ó he declaimedin the high diction of patriotic exhortation, Òis the duty ofrevealing to the people reasons for the faith that is inthem more directly laid than on the historian, for by itshistory a people lives.Ó This was already a conception of픀s calling that was widely shared, with theesult that arguments such as UnderhillÕs evoked respons-es at scholarly and political levels alike.on, for example, much less engagedin public issues than Underhill, was nevertheless fullytake. His biography of Sir John A.Macdonald was partly an answer to the proposition thatpolitical ideas and actions were driven by material inter-ts. Macdonald, for him, was a romantic and an idealist.fered by the essay form, Creightoncould be every bit as direct as Underhill, with whom hisrelations were never easy. Both men participated in aseries of lectures at Carleton University in 1956, whichwere subsequently published (essays having something ofthe nature of lectures in prose, as the editor, ClaudeBissell, noted).Underhill began the series with a talk on Blake, elab-orating on Blake픀s liberalism and on the tragedy (as hesaw it) of a political leader of such views fated to live inan era really governed by Òbusiness men on the make.팀Creighton followed two lectures later, on Macdonald,with a lecture that began with a full five pages of wither-ing sarcasm directed at the dominance of what he calledthe Òauthorized versionÓ Ñ that is, the ÒLiberal or GritinterpretationÓ and, unmistakably, UnderhillÕs interpreta-tion Ñ of Canadian history. He portrayed himself as ahe hard work of archival research, and was coura-o those who merely parroted 2007 that, in an age when Canada was threatened by the dom-ination of the United States, MacdonaldÕs more trulyationalist conception of the nation as the NorthAmerican ally of Great Britain had taken on new mean-ing. There can be no doubt, reading Creighton, thatUnderhillÕs take on Canadian political history had animpact; nor can one think that he had any monopoly onsarcasm as an instrument of rhetoric.The combativeness and present-mindedness ofUnderhillÕs essays carried costs. There was seldom muchdistance, detachment, or disinterestedness in his accountsof things past; he was more devoted to extracting lessonsfor the present than to reconstructing what the past was like . His concern was always to make an argument ratherthan to tell a story. Carl Berger, in his history ofCanadian historical thought in the twentieth century,judges him more journalist than historian, and othershave done so as well. This is perhaps to construe too nar-rowly the legitimate modes of historical inquiry, whichhas often been driven by a desire to uncover roots andto trace antecedents, to remember forgotten heroes andto right present wrongs.Lord Acton, the eminent English liberal historian ofthe late nineteenth century, best known today for pro-nouncing on the necessary conjuncture of corruption andpower, believed in the inseparability of politics and histo-ry. Delivering his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor ofidge University in 1895, heuoted his predecessor, Sir John Seeley: ÒPolitics are vul-gar when they are not liberalised by history, and historyo mere literature [ erature sight of its relation to practical politics.Ó This was not anatement of the moralpurpose of historical study and the wellspring of historicalcuriosity. Still, Berger픀s judgement points up a weakness innderhillÕs history: political activism is bound to limitor empathy with ideas and actions in thepast, which are so often grounded in motivations, circum-stances, and intellectual assumptions foreign to the pres-ent, even when they appear to be similar in kind.UnderhillÕs understanding of George Brown and theToronto , for example, was shaped as much by hissympathy for the western farmersÕ movements of the1920s as it was by the content and structure of newspa-per editorials published sixty years earlier. Modern schol-arship has moderated the radicalism of Brown픀s politicalopinions, situated them more in the context of transat-lantic Victorian liberalism than of grassroots farmersseeking radical democratic reform, and made Brown asmuch a sectional businessman promoting Toronto as atribune of political reform. We must be careful, ourselves,of course, not to project the findings of modern scholar-ship into the past. Underhill was working without thech, whichfected the conclusions he reached, and he was influ-k Jackson Turner픀s Òfrontier thesisÓ Ñthe westward-moving frontier of trade and settlement Ñwhich was a proposition that many historians thoughtould be adapted to Canadian conditions and circum-stances. That having been said, the contemporary perti-nence of his argument, rendering the Clear Grits ofUpper Canada the spiritual forebears of the contempo-rary prairie Progressives, undoubtedly helped to deter-mine what he saw in his evidence.If present-mindedness undermined UnderhillÕs histo-ry, it probably enhanced his authority Ð that qualitywhich gives one licence to engage publicly and whichmoves one픀s readers to pay attention. Authority takes dif-ferent forms. UnderhillÕs was moral, even when he waswriting history, which further distinguished him from his-torians of succeeding generations, whether they werewriting for the public or for students and their profession-al colleagues; for example, from Ramsay Cook, whoseauthority even in the public sphere is professional andscholarly. It is true that in CookÕs case, as he has recent-ly written, he was led to become an expert on Quebecand nationalism Ñ the chief focuses of his public interven-tions Ñ by sheer fascination and by the demands of citi-zenship, but his public standing has rested on his profes- bona fides . He is a historian who is also an intellec-tual. Underhill, by contrast, was an intellectual who wasalso a historian. He wrote in the tradition of the publicmoralist, stretching back to John Stuart Mill in Englandole as a guide to the rest of society and in thegood that would result if only they followed his lead. Hise linked mid-twentieth-century Canadato the Victorian era.nderhillÕs ends and his castof mind, as, indeed, it suited Lord Acton픀s. He was ill-dis-posed to entering another time and place for purposes ofprehension and re-creation, and may have been inca-e faulted him for his failureto produce a book Ñ that is, a monograph Ñ in his entirecareer, and it is certainly a striking absence, in view of hisvoluminous output of shorter writings. It is also true thathe was defeated by the biggest project he ever took on,the biography of Blake. Yet, his shorter forays intoaspects of Blake픀s leadership, and his numerous otherstudies of nineteenth-century Canadian liberalism (alwaysfocused on Ontario) influenced a generation of scholars.His contention that Liberals more or less abandonedtheir ideological roots in the Clear Grit movement ofmid-century and gradually adopted a brokerage modelof politics under the leadership of Blake and Laurier con-tinues to carry weight among historians.The essay enabled him to argue and re-evaluate, tofollow a single theme independent of the larger set ofevents and conditions of which it was a part. This was itses thateconstructed a rounded representation of time and place,yzed a subject such as thee opportunity for nuance and qualification, and for the play of backgroundand foreground. Essays are all foreground, or UnderhillÕsere. They followed their theme, in a sometimes mean-dering course, to a conclusion of one kind or another.It has also not helped UnderhillÕs reputation that theessay, for all its ubiquity, is primarily regarded as a liter-ary form, devoted to literary ends. In present-day terms,it is a species of literary, or creative, non-fiction. Criticstend to ignore the historical essay in favour of other non-fiction modes that seem to offer more latitude to theexpression of a personal voice Ñ the travel essay, forexample, or the moral essay. The historical essay, howev-er strong its personal tone and however evident its person-al point of view, must be grounded in its sources, whatev-er these may be and whether or not they are acknowl-edged in citations, which in some way vitiates its literarystatus. Many of the leading essayists in the English lan-guage have nevertheless been historians: ThomasBabington Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Isaiah Berlin inGreat Britain; Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, andJ.H. Hexter in the United States; Underhill, W.L. Morton,and Ramsay Cook in Canada. All of these authors suc-ceed in combining voice and authority in a mutually rein-forcing manner, while still writing history. But when crit-ics think of essayists, they think of George Orwell, E.B.White, and George Woodcock.Even as a literary form, the essay has an ambiguoushe fact that it is so often a writer픀sy activity. Margaret Atwood writes essays, but really a novelist; Mark Kingwell writes essays, but eally ofessor. The same was oftentrue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesed their eal (and their income) by essay-writing. Essays, in fact, takeso many forms, address so many different subjects, andy venues that critics sometimes wonderhe essayÕ is a genre at all, much less one worthdevoting a lifetime to exploiting. Underhill was an essay-ist, period, and the absence of some prior core activityleft him vulnerable to the accusation of never havingadopted a serious writing or scholarly vocation.Yet the essa秕s flexibility and its revival in the lastdecade or so suggest that it might usefully merit therenewed attention of historians, other humanists, andsocial scientists today. I would not recommend a whole-sale return either to UnderhillÕs history or to his methods,which revolved around the close study of successive polit-ical speeches, debates, pamphlets, and other public doc-uments Ñ Blake픀s Aurora speech of 1874, his ÔfamousMalvern speechÕ in the 1887 election campaign, his WestDurham letter of 1891. (These were not his methodsalone, it should be said. Donald Creighton픀s graduateseminar at the University of Toronto was organizedround similar political, legal, and constitutional textsand an assessment of their value as well as their histori-cal significance.) These methods were what proponentsof the new social history had in mind when they criti-cized the narrowness and superficiality of traditionalpolitical history, even though, as we have seen, Underhillhimself had thought they added to it a new and neces-sary intellectual dimension.If what he did offers us uncertain guidance, howev-er, the way he did it nevertheless contains some lessonsfor current intellectual practice. Underhill was not a jour-nalist. He was a historian of wide learning whose classi-cal background often surfaced in his essays. The literarycritic Desmond Pacey once told him that Northrop Fryehad, in his younger days, in 1937, regarded UnderhillÕs Forum essays as Òthe best Canadian prose being pro-duced.Ó Pacey himself agreed, admiring especially theÒcrisp, idiomatic and epigrammatic qualityÓ inUnderhillÕs writing. History today Ñ to stay only withUnderhillÕs own discipline Ñ suffers from a radical breachbetween an abstract and professionalized academic dis-course that often descends into arid sectarian controver-sy or the marginal modification of interpretative theory,and a practice of popular history that often judges its suc-cess by its fictive creativity and by the size of its audience,idelity to the past. The openness of they form and its capacity for direct engagement with itsreaders, as well as its historic role in bridging the gapeen science and art, offers a potential means ofresolving some of the tensions arising from the so-calleds,Õ which have pitted academics against jour-nalists and professionals against amateurs.The essay originated, as Graham Good has argued,aigne픀s search for a mode of thought and com-he ossified rules and conven-tions of late medieval scholasticism, whose practitionersapplied themselves to the analysis and interpretation ofauthorized texts once or twice removed from the secularand spiritual problems that were their original concern.Sceptical of dogma, system, and authority, he found inthe essay an instrument of open-ended reflection uponthe messy, multifarious, and changing quotidian reality ofthe world around him. Ever since, essayists have followedhis example, inviting their readers to participate in ashared experience of critical engagement. Success hasalways entailed a certain measure of rhetorical skill, andis predicated on the existence of effective media of com-munication, but it first requires a will to communicateand to imagine a receptive reading public. 2007 The Underhill Review , 2007