Stella and Swift

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 436, 31 October 1947, Page 9

Stella and Swift

HE love affairs of great men have always been fair game to their biographers, and the more they are shrouded in the mists of time and discretion, the more relentlessly are they pursued. Esther Johnson, to whom Jonathan Swift addressed his letters in the Journal to Stella; seems at least to have given them a run for their money. It was inevitable that the talk on Swift in the series Diarists and Letter-Writers should deal very largely with the question of Stella, and of their relationship: but I liked particularly Rose Macaulay’s method of dealing with it. She states the various conclusions that have been drawn by one person or another from the available facts-that Swift was really married to Stella, for instance, or that they never met without a third person-but she refrains from associating herself with any one of these conflicting views. The big advantage of this is, of course, that it leaves the listener free to form his own views, cynical, sentimental, or what-have-you. Sometimes I find it hard to condone the publication of letters such as these with * all their wealth of intimacy, their endearments, and the "faintly embarraésing" baby-talk that Swift uses on occa-: sions. But by way of consolation it is certainly true that the Journal to Stella shows a side of Swift that is as rare as it is human and attractive. |