Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett — A Closer Reading

A Return to the Nest: Place and Memory

The first essay, 'A Return to the Nest,' establishes Hewlett's method: he uses a physical journey to unlock family history. The language is precise about landscape—'softly contoured' hills, a 'great rock'—and vague about motive, admitting he 'never understood' the great-grandfather's move until that day. This restraint is characteristic. Hewlett does not invent psychology; he observes the surface and lets it suggest depth. The essay's title itself is a metaphor for the collection's backward glance, but the writing remains anchored in specific geography: Wincanton, Shaftesbury, Blackmore Vale. Readers will notice how often Hewlett returns to such grounding details, using them as springboards for wider reflection.

French Portraits: Retz and Maintenon

In essays on Cardinal de Retz and Madame de Maintenon, Hewlett shifts from English soil to French courts. His voice becomes more aphoristic: 'Greek was meeting Greek' he says of Retz and Mazarin, and of Maintenon he notes she 'had it both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what she did.' The judgments are sharp but grounded in evidence—he cites Saint-Simon, Mme de Sévigné, and a 'recent admirable study' by Mme Saint-René Taillandier. Hewlett does not claim definitive biography; instead, he weighs conflicting accounts, noting that Maintenon 'showed Huguenot characteristics' even after conversion. The prose balances sympathy with critical distance, as when he calls her 'dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate' yet 'a good woman.'

Ballads and Origins: The Craft of the Vernacular

Several essays—'Ballad-Origins,' 'Peasant Poets,' 'Doggerel or Not'—examine folk poetry and its relation to literary art. Hewlett is interested in the border between 'real and temporal creation,' as one title puts it. He writes as a practitioner, not a theorist, noting how ballads survive through oral repetition and how 'doggerel' can carry genuine feeling. The diction is unpretentious: he speaks of 'the joy of battle' in Retz's memoirs and of 'the brain taut, the eye alert' in political intrigue. These phrases reveal his own aesthetic: a preference for energy over polish, for the vernacular over the academic. The essays on poetry are less about definition than about appreciation of a living tradition.

The Lingering of the Light: Seasonal Essays

The final group of essays—'Crocus and Primrose,' 'Daffodils,' 'Windflowers,' 'Tulips,' 'Summer,' 'The Lingering of the Light'—turns to natural observation. Here Hewlett's prose becomes more lyrical, but still avoids sentimentality. He describes flowers with botanical precision and notes the quality of light at different times of day. The title 'The Lingering of the Light' captures the collection's temporal awareness: these are essays written late in life, attentive to endings. Yet the tone is not elegiac; it is curious, even playful. Hewlett's voice remains that of a man who has read widely and traveled far, but who finds his deepest satisfaction in the particular—a hillside, a memoir, a tulip opening in the sun.

Hewlett's essays reward the patient reader. They assume a shared interest in history, literature, and the natural world, and they trust the reader to follow digressions. The collection is best approached not as a systematic argument but as a series of conversations with a learned, genial companion. Read them in any order; each stands alone. But read them slowly, attending to the turns of phrase and the unexpected connections—between a Somerset lane and a French cardinal, between a ballad and a tulip. That is where Hewlett's craft resides.

There’s a particular ache in reading Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett—he writes of Somerset lanes and old ballads as if tracing a map of what slips away. That same quiet attention to fleeting things lingers in his other collection, Faces in the Fire, and Other Fancies — Context and Discussion, where I found myself remembering how he always trusted the small, glowing moment to hold more than we expect.