Andrew Macphail was a kind of Canadian Renaissance man whose principal role as a writer was complemented by his roles as soldier and professor. Even though in his professional versatility he demonstrated the negative as well as the positive qualities of the dilettante, Macphail did seem to come as close as any Canadian to becoming at once a jack- and master-of-all-trades. An experimenter in fiction, drama, and poetry, Macphail excelled as an essayist, with profound historical, ideological, editorial, argumentative, and discursive skills. In the essay form, more than in any other literary form, he found his voice, and in the process of writing essays he discovered a voice for Canada itself during the relatively silent years preceding and following World War I. These were watershed years for Macphail personally, in that the Great War (which for a half-century thereafter assumed archetypal associations in the writings of novelists such...