In the autumn of 1914 a censorship department was improvised in the
office of the National Service League. A press-gang of two, working the
clubs of London and the colleges of Oxford, established the nucleus of
a staff; and the first recruits were given, as their earliest duty, the
task of bringing in more recruits. As the department had been formed to
examine the commercial correspondence of neutrals and enemies, the first
qualification of a candidate was a knowledge of languages; and, in the
preliminary search for recruits, Alfred Sutro convinced the friend who
had succeeded him in translating Maeterlinck that a man who was equally
at home in English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch and Danish, with
a smattering of ecclesiastical Latin, was too valuable to be spared.
Teixeira joined the growing brotherhood of lawyers, dons and business
men in Palace Street, Westminster, advising on intercepted letters and
cables, curtailing the activities of traders in contraband, assimilating
the procedure of a government department and being paid stealthily each
week, like a member of some criminal association, with a furtive bundle
of notes.
It was his first experience of the public service, almost his only taste
of responsibility; and it marked the end of the cloistered life. Though
he brought to his new work a varied knowledge of affairs, Teixeira had
participated but little in them since his marriage in 1900. The friends
of his youth, when he was living in the Temple,—John Gray and Ernest
Dowson, William Wilde (whose widow he married) and William Campbell,—such
acquaintances as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, Robert Ross and Bernard
Shaw, Leonard Smithers and Frank Harris, were for the most part scattered
or dead; and, though he kept touch with J. T. Grein, Edgar Jepson, Alfred
Sutro and a few more, he seemed at this time, after Campbell’s death, to
lack opportunity and inclination for making new friends.
His gregarious years, and the varied experience which they brought,
belonged to an earlier period. Coming from Amsterdam to London in 1874
at the age of nine, the son of a Dutch father and an English mother,
Teixeira[1] placed himself under instruction with Monsignor Capel and
was received into the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In blood, faith and
nationality, the Dutch Protestant of Portuguese-Jewish extraction had
thus passed through many vicissitudes before he married an Irish wife,
became a British citizen and died a Catholic. Traces of the Jew survived
in his appearance; of the Dutchman in his speech; and his intellectual
and racial mixed ancestry was betrayed by a cosmopolitan outlook.
Ignorant of many prejudices that are the native Briton’s birthright, he
remained ever aloof from the passions of British thought and speech. If
he respected, at least he could not share the conventional enthusiasms
nor associate himself with the conventional judgements of his new
countrymen. He wrote of his neighbours among whom he had lived for
more than forty years, with an unaffected sense of remoteness, as “the
English”; after his naturalization, he was fond of talking, tongue
in cheek, about what “we English” thought and did; but, in the last
analysis, he embodied too many various strains to favour any single
nationality.
After being educated at the Kensington Catholic Public School and at
Beaumont, Teixeira worked for some time in the City and was rescued for
literature by J. T. Grein, who made him secretary of the Independent
Theatre. By his work as a translator and as the London correspondent of a
Dutch paper, he lived precariously until his renderings of Maeterlinck,
whose official translator he became with _The Double Garden_, called
public attention to a new quality of scholarship. Though he flirted with
journalism, as editor of _Dramatic Opinions_ and of _The Candid Friend_,
and with publishing, in connection with Leonard Smithers, translation
was the business of his life until he entered government service. He is
best known for his version of Fabre’s natural history, which he lived
to complete and which he himself regarded as his greatest achievement,
for the later plays and essays of Maeterlinck, for the novels and stories
of Ewald and for the novels of Couperus. These, however, formed only a
part of his output; and his bibliography includes the names of Zola,
Châteaubriand, de Tocqueville, President Kruger, Maurice Leblanc, Madame
Leblanc, Streuvels and many more. One work alone ran to more than a
million words; and he married on a commission to translate what he called
“the longest book in any language”.
The improvised censorship was not long suffered to function unmolested.
The home secretary, learning that his majesty’s mails were being opened
without due authority, warned the unorthodox censors that they were
incurring a heavy fine for each offence and advised them to regularize
their position. Simultaneously, the Customs were thrown into difficulty
and confusion,[2] by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding
all trade with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an
intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods cleared
from London would ultimately reach enemy destination; and the censors who
were watching the cable and wireless operations of Dutch and Scandinavian
importers seemed the natural advisers to approach. At this point the
embryonic department, which had risen from the ashes of the National
Service League, joined with a licensing delegation from the Customs to
form the War Trade Department and Trade Clearing House.
Drifting about Westminster from Palace Street to Central Buildings, from
Central Buildings to Broadway House and from Broadway House to Lake
Buildings, St. James’ Park, the War Trade Intelligence Department, as it
came to be called, was made the advisory body to the Blockade Department
of the Foreign Office, with Lord Robert Cecil as its parliamentary
chief, Sir Henry Penson, of Worcester College, as its chairman, and H.
W. C. Davis, of Balliol, as its deputy-chairman. Teixeira, as the head
of the Intelligence Section, controlled the supply of advice on the
export of “prohibited commodities” to neutral countries; as a member
of the Advisory Board, he came later to share in responsibility for
the department as a whole. Among his colleagues, not already named,
were “Freddie” Browning, the first organizer of the department, O.
R. A. Simpkin, now Public Trustee, H. B. Betterton, now a member of
parliament, Michael Sadleir, the novelist, R. S. Rait, the Scottish
Historiographer-Royal, John Palmer, the dramatic critic, and G. L.
Bickersteth, the translator of Carducci.
When the department came to an end, Teixeira resumed his interrupted task
of translation, which had, indeed, never been wholly abandoned; his daily
programme during the war was to work at home from 5.0 a.m. till 8.0 a.m.
and in his department from 10.0 a.m. till 6.0 p.m. or 7.0 p.m., then to
play bridge for an hour at the Cleveland Club, returning home in time for
a light dinner and an early bed.[3]
Leisure, when at last it came to him, was not to be long enjoyed:
early in 1920, a further break in health compelled him to undertake
a rest-cure, first at Crowborough and then in the Isle of Wight. He
returned to Chelsea in the spring of 1921 and spent the summer and
autumn working in London or staying with friends in the country, to all
appearances better than he had been for some years, though in play and
work alike he had now to walk circumspectly. Towards the end of the year
he went to Cornwall for the winter and collapsed from _angina pectoris_
on 5 December 1921.
In a life of nearly fifty-seven years Teixeira escaped almost everything
that could be considered spectacular. Happy in the devotion of his wife
and the love of his friends, unshaken in the faith which he had embraced
and untroubled by the misgivings and melancholy that assail a temperament
less serene, he faced the world with a manner of gentle understanding
and a philosophy of almost universal toleration. His only child—a
boy—died within a few hours of birth; Teixeira was troubled for years by
ill-health; he was never rich and seldom even assured of a comfortable
income. Nevertheless his temper or faith gave him power to extract more
amusement from his sufferings than most men derive from the plentitude
of health and fortune. Of a malady new even to his experience he writes:
“Is death imminent? Why do I always have the rarer disorders?” He loved
life to the end—the world was always “God’s dear world” to him—; to the
end, he, who had known so many of the world’s waifs, continued forbearing
to all but the censorious. “I was taught very early in life,” he writes,
“to make every allowance for men of any genius, whereas you look for a
public-school attitude towards all and sundry.... You see, if one cared
to take the pains, one could make you detest pretty well everybody you
know and like. For everybody has a mean, petty, shabby, cowardly side to
him; and one had only to tell you of what the man in question chooses to
keep concealed.” ...
“Life,” said Samuel Butler, “is like playing a violin solo in public
and learning the instrument as one goes on.” Those who met Teixeira
only in his later years must have felt that he was born a master of his
instrument; it is not to be imagined that there could ever have been a
time when he was ignorant of the grace, the urbanity, the consideration
and the gusto that mark off the artist in life from his fellows.