I
“_A great translator_,” one friend wrote of Teixeira, “_is far more rare
than a great author._”
Judged by the quality and volume of his work, by the range of foreign
languages from which he translated and by the perfection of the English
in which he rendered them, Teixeira was incontestably the greatest
translator of his time. Throughout Great Britain and the United States
his name has long been held in honour by all who have watched, cheering,
as the literature of France and Belgium, of Germany and the Netherlands,
of Denmark and Norway strode along the broad viaduct which his labours
had, in great part, established.
Of the man, apart from his name, little has been made public. His love
of laughing at himself might prompt him to say: “When you write my
_Life and Letters_ ...”; but his modesty and his humour would have been
perturbed in equal measure by the vision of a solemn biography and a
low-voiced press. “I was a little bit underpraised before,” he once
confessed; “I’m being a little bit overpraised now.” Since the best of
himself went impartially into all that he wrote, his conscience could
never be haunted by the recollection of shoddy workmanship, even in the
days before he had a reputation to jeopardize; nor, when he had won
recognition, could his head be turned by the announcement that he had
created a masterpiece. If he enjoyed the consciousness of having filled
the English treasury with the literary spoils of six countries, he
dissembled his enjoyment. In so far as he wished to be remembered at all,
it was not as a man of letters, but as a friend, a connoisseur of life,
a man of sympathy unaging and zest unstaled, a lover of simple jests, a
laughing philosopher. Of their charity, he wished those who loved him to
have masses said for the repose of his soul; he would have been tortured
by the thought that, in life or death, he had brought unhappiness to
any one or that, dead or living, he had prompted any one to discuss him
with pomposity. “Are you not being a little solemn?” was a question that
alternated with the advice: “Cultivate a pococurantist attitude to life.”
“If there had been no _Alice in Wonderland_,” said another friend, “it
would have been necessary for Tex to create her.”
Those who knew the translator of Fabre and Ewald, of Maeterlinck and
Couperus only by his awe-inspiring name must detect in this a hint that
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos had a lighter side to his nature; the
suspicion can best be established or laid by the evidence of his own
letters.
The present volume is an attempt to sketch the man in outline for those
readers who have recognized his talent in scholarship without guessing
his genius for friendship. “The apostles are not all dead,” he wrote,
in criticism of the legends that were growing up around the men of the
nineties; “many of them are your living contemporaries; you could, if you
like, receive at first hand their memories of their dead fellows.” ... It
is the purpose of this sketch to present one ‘apostle’ as he revealed
himself to one of his disciples. A biography and bibliography will be
found in the appropriate works of reference. Only a single chapter has
been attempted here; of those who knew him during the nineties, which
he loved so well and of which he preserved the tradition so faithfully,
perhaps one will write that earlier chapter and describe Teixeira in the
position which he took up on their outskirts. And one better qualified
than the present writer should paint this sphinx of the bridge-table,
with his perversity of declaration and his brilliance of play. “You have
made your contract,” admitted a friend who was partnering him for the
first time; “but ... but ... but _why_ that declaration?” “I wanted to
see your expression,” answered Teixeira with the complacency of a man
who did not greatly mind whether he won or lost, but abominated a dull
game. Those who knew him all his life may feel, with the writer, that the
last half-dozen years constitute, naturally and dramatically, a chapter
by themselves. They are the period of his literary recognition and,
unhappily, of his physical decline; of his emergence from seclusion; of
his first public services and his last private friendships.
By 1914 Teixeira stood in the forefront of English translators; and,
through his labours, translation had won a place in the forefront of
English literature. Almost simultaneously with the outbreak of war,
he was attacked by the heart-affection that ultimately killed him;
and the record of this period is the record of an invalid. Ill-health
notwithstanding, he offered his energy and ability to the country of his
adoption; and, in an emergency war-department largely staffed by men of
letters, the most retiring of them all became enmeshed in the machinery
of government. From his marriage until the war, Teixeira had lived an
almost monastic life, only relaxing his rule of solitary work in favour
of the bridge-table. Once set in the midst of appreciative friends,
this sham recluse found himself entertaining and being entertained,
joining new clubs, indulging his old inscrutable sociability and almost
overcoming his former shyness.
For three-and-a-half out of these last seven years, one of Teixeira’s
colleagues worked with him almost daily at the same table in the same
room of the same department. The rare separations due to leave or illness
were countered by an almost daily correspondence, conducted in the spirit
of an intimate and elaborate game; and, when the work of the department
ended, the letters—sometimes interrupted by a diary or suspended for a
meeting—kept the intimacy unbroken.
So written, they are as personal, as discursive and—to a stranger—as full
of allusion as the long-sustained conversation of two friends. It is to
be hoped that, in their present form, they are at least not obscure; of
these, and of all, letters it must not be forgotten that the writer was
not counting his words for a telegram nor selecting his subjects for
later publication.
From his half of the correspondence—in a life untouched by
drama—Teixeira’s personality may be left to reconstruct itself. Not every
side of his character is revealed, for an interchange conducted primarily
as a game afforded him few opportunities of exhibiting his serene
philosophy and meditative bent. The absence of all calculation from his
mind—a part of his refusal to grow up—may, for want of counter-availing
ballast, be interpreted as flippancy. And, as the man was greater than
the word he wrote and the word he translated, his letters have to be
supplied by imagination with some of the radiance which he shed over
preposterous story and trivial jest. Charm, which is so hard to analyse
in the living, is yet harder to recapture from the dead; but, if the
record of a single friendship can suggest loyalty, courage, generosity
and tenderness, if a whimsical turn of phrase can indicate humour,
patience and an infinite capacity for providing and receiving enjoyment,
Teixeira’s letters will preserve, for those who did not know him, the
fragrance of spirit recognized and remembered by all who did.