Though his letters contain scattered references to the principles which
he followed in translation, Teixeira could never be persuaded to publish
his complete and considered theory. His excuse was that he had never
been able to write more than eight hundred words of original matter, a
disability that once threatened him with disaster when he was invited
to lecture on the science and art of bridge to the members of a club
formed for mutual improvement and the pursuit of learning. After being
entertained at a fortifying banquet, Teixeira delivered his eight-hundred
words. As, at the end of the two and three-quarter minutes which his
reading occupied, the audience seemed ready and even anxious for more,
he read his address a second time. Later, he began in the middle; later
still, he ran disgracefully from the hall.
The method which he followed in translation has, therefore, to be
reconstructed from the internal evidence of his books and from personal
experience in collaboration.
“I shall not,” wrote Matthew Arnold in criticizing Newman, “in the least
concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the
translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the _Iliad_, a poem that
shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have
affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that we cannot
possibly tell _how_ the _Iliad_ ‘affected its natural hearers.’”
The first quality that distinguishes Teixeira from most of the
translators whose work and methods of work have swelled the controversial
literature of translation is that he confined himself to modern authors.
Unacquainted with Greek and little versed in Latin, he was never faced
with the difficulty of having to imagine how an original work affected
its natural hearers. Maeterlinck and Couperus were his personal friends;
Fabre and Ewald, who predeceased him, were older contemporaries; it is
only with de Tocqueville and Châteaubriand that he had to gauge the
intellectual atmosphere of an earlier generation. In judging whether
his English rendering left on the minds of English readers the same
impression as the original had left on its “natural hearers”, he had
a court of appeal always available; and, while the English reader is
“lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work”, the
foreign author can testify to the fidelity with which his text has been
followed and his spirit reproduced. “What a magnificent translation _The
Tour_ is!” Couperus writes; “what a most charming little book it has
become! I am in raptures over it and have read it and reread it all day
and have had tears in my eyes and have laughed over it. You may think it
silly of me to say all this; but it has become an exquisitely beautiful
work in its English form. My warmest congratulations!”
To achieve this illusion, Teixeira began his literary life with the
most essential quality of a translator: an equal knowledge of the
language that was to be translated and of the language into which he was
translating it. English and Dutch came to him by inheritance; French
and Flemish, German and Danish he added by study; and throughout his
working life he was incessantly sharpening, polishing and adding to
his tools. Limitless reading refreshed a vast vocabulary; meticulous
accuracy refined his meanings and justified his usages. His dictionaries
were annotated freely; and the margins of his manuscripts were filled
with challenges and suggestions for his friends to consider, until his
own exacting fastidiousness had at last been satisfied. Apart from
professional lexicographers, it would have been difficult to find a man
with more words in current use; it would have been almost impossible
to find one who employed them with nicer precision. Learning sat too
lightly on his shoulders to make him vain of it, but no one could hear
or correspond with him without realizing the presence of a purist; he
seldom quoted, mistrusting his memory, confessed himself an amateur
in colloquial dialogue and refused with equal obstinacy to venture on
English metaphors and English field-sports. “I do not know the difference
between a niblick and a foursome,” he would protest. “When you say that
your withers are unwrung, I do not know whether you are boasting or
complaining. What are your withers? Have you any, to begin with? Do you
‘wring’ them or ‘ring’ them? And why can’t you leave them alone?”
Not content with mastering five foreign languages, Teixeira created a
new literary English for every new kind of book that he translated. His
versions of Maeterlinck’s _Blue Bird_, Couperus’ _Old People and The
Things That Pass_, Fabre’s _Hunting Wasps_ and Ewald’s _My Little Boy_
have nothing in common but their exquisite sympathy and scholarship;
four different men might have produced them if four men could be
found with the same taste, knowledge and diligence. Fabre’s ingenuous
air of perpetual discovery demanded the style of a grave, grown-up
child; Maeterlinck’s mystical essays invited a hint of preciosity and
aloofness, to suggest that omniscience was expounding infinity through
symbols older than time; and the atmospheric sixth-sense of Couperus
had to be communicated by a sensitiveness of language that could create
pictures and conjure up intangible clouds of discontent, guilty terror,
suppressed antagonism or universal boredom. In reading the original,
Teixeira seemed to steep himself in the personality of his author until
he could pass, like a repertory actor, from one mood and expression
to another; his own mannerisms are confined to a few easily defended
peculiarities of spelling and punctuation.
For a man who must surely have divined that his calibre was unique,
Teixeira was engagingly free from touchiness. In translating a book, as
in organizing a department, he was magnificently grateful for the word
that had eluded him and for the criticism which he had not foreseen. A
purist in language and a precisian in everything, he realized that a
living style is throttled by too great obedience to rules; but he was
afraid, even in dialogue, of unchaining a wind of colloquialism which
he might be unable to control; and, in constructing the deliberately
artificial speech of his Maeterlinck translations, he recognized that he
lacked his readers’ age-old familiarity with the English of the Bible.
Though his passion for consistency led him to say: “My name ought to
have been Procrus-Tex,” he stretched out both hands for an authority
that would justify him in broadening his rule. “I have always spelt
judgment without an e in the middle,” he declared in 1915, when, with the
gravity that characterized his more trivial decisions, he had abandoned
violet ink, because it seemed frivolous in war-time, and the long s (ſ),
because it bore a Teutonic aspect. “I am too old to change now; and you
know my rule, All or None.” Four years later he announced: “In future
I shall spell ‘judgement’ with an e in the middle. The New English
Dictionary favours it; you assure me that it is so spelt in your English
prayer-book; and Germany has signed the peace terms.”
No comparison with other translators can be attempted until another
arise with Teixeira’s range of languages and his volume of achievement.
He himself could never say, within a dozen, how many books he had
translated; but in them all he created such an illusion of originality
that they are not suspected of being translations until his name is seen.
In a wider view, he undermined the pretensions of those who boasted
that they could never read translations; and, if no one is likely to be
found with all his gifts, he at least prepared the way for a new school
of translators. It may be hoped that, after the battles which he fought,
important foreign authors will not again be sacrificed to illiterate
hacks at five-shillings a thousand words: it may even be expected that
competent scholars will no longer disdain the task of translating
contemporary works. All literary predictions are rash; but there seems
little risk in prophesying that Teixeira’s renderings of Fabre, Couperus
and Maeterlinck will be read as long as the originals.
The tangible fruits of his astonishing industry are only a part of his
achievement: it is to him, in company with Constance Garnett, William
Archer, Aylmer Maude and the other undaunted pioneers, that English
readers owe their escape from the self-satisfied insularity with which
they had protected themselves against continental literature. When
publishers have been convinced that translations need not be unprofitable
and when a conservative public has discovered that they need not be
unreadable, a future generation may be privileged to have prompt access
to every noteworthy book in whatsoever language it has been written,
without waiting as the present generation has had to wait for an English
rendering of Tolstoi, Turgenieff, Dostoieffski and Tchehov.
In conversation Teixeira took little pleasure in discussing himself;
in correspondence he could not help giving himself away. The reader
will deduce, from his slow surrender of intimacy, the shyness that ever
conflicted with his sociability; the absence of all allusions to his
literary work, save when he fancied that a second opinion might help him,
is evidence of a personal modesty that amounted almost to unconsciousness
of his position in letters. Diffidence and sociability, first
conflicting, then joining forces, led him in his departmental work to
discuss every problem with a friend; and in all personal relationships,
he needed an hourly confidant because everything in life was an adventure
to be shared and might be worked in later to the saga with which he
strove to make himself ridiculous for the diversion of his company.
“Thus,” he writes of a childish freak, “do the elderly amuse themselves
for the further amusement of a limited circle.” Weighty commissions were
assembled, daring expeditions set out under his leadership to choose a
dressing-gown for country-house wear; the grey tall-hat with which he
surprised one private view of the Royal Academy was no less of a surprise
to him and even more of an abiding pleasure. For a year or two afterwards
he would telephone on the first of May: “If you will wear your goodish
white topper to-day, I will wear mine”; and once, when these conspicuous
headpieces were in evidence, he led the way to Covent Garden Market, with
the words: “It is not every day that the women of the market see two men
in such hats, such coats and such spats, standing before a fruit-stall
with their canes crooked over their arms and their yellow gloves
protruding from their pockets, consuming the first green figs of the year
in the year’s first sunshine.”
In conversation he once boasted that he was never bored; and, though
every man and woman at the table volunteered the names of at least six
people who would bore him to extinction, the boast was justified in
that, however irksome one moment might be, it could always be invested
afterwards with the glamour of an eccentric adventure. Somewhere,
among his immediate ascendants, there must have been a not too remote
ancestor of Peter Pan. On his fifty-sixth birthday, Teixeira was having
a party arranged for him, with a cake and fifty-six tiny candles; for
days beforehand he had been asking for presents of any kind, to impress
the other visitors in his hotel; and, if he knew one joy greater than
receiving presents, it was finding an excuse to give them.
With the heart of a child in all things, he had the child’s quality of
being frightened by small pains and undaunted by great; a cut finger was
an occasion for panic, but the threat of blindness found him indomitable.
Herein he was supported throughout life by the faith which he had
acquired in boyhood and which he preserved until his death. “I save my
temper,” he once wrote, “by not discussing religion except with Catholics
or politics except with liberals. There’s room for discussion in the
_nuances_; there’s too much room for it with those who call my black
white.” ... While it was generally known among his friends that he was
a devout Catholic, only a few were allowed to see how much reliance he
placed in religion; and he would grow impatient with what he considered a
morbid protestant passion for worrying at something that for him had been
immutably settled.
In political debates he would only join at the prompting of extreme
sympathy or extreme exasperation. His native feeling for the Boers in
the Transvaal was little shared in England during the South African
war; and his loathing for English misrule in Ireland was too strong to
be ventilated acceptably among the people whom he met most commonly in
London. His connection with the Legitimist cause came to an end with the
outbreak of war: though he had hitherto delighted in penetrating between
the sentries at St. James’ Palace and placarding the wall with an appeal
to all loyal subjects of the rightful king, he was unable to continue
his allegiance when Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria became an enemy alien.
Legitimacy and Catholicism, apart from other claims on his regard,
gratified a love for ceremonial and tradition that would have been more
incongruous in a liberal if Teixeira’s whole equipment of beliefs,
practices and preferences had not been a collection of incongruities.
Though he detested militarism, he could never understand why the English
civilians omitted to uncover to the colours; hating pomposity, he enjoyed
the grand manner in address and, on being greeted by a peer as “my dear
sir,” replied “my dear lord” in a formula beloved by Disraeli. As a
relief to an accuracy of expression which he himself called Procrustean
and pernickety, he would transform any word that he thought would look
or sound more engaging for a little mutilation. It was a bad day for the
English of his letters when he read Heine and entered into competition
for the most torturing play upon words; his case became hopeless when
he was introduced to a couple of friends who could pun with him in
four or five languages. It was this bent of mind that may justify the
description of him[4] as the son of Edward Lear and the grandson of
Charles Lamb.
Underlying the whimsical humour of his letters and peeping through the
mock solemnity of his speech was a young child’s concern for the welfare
of his friends: himself never growing up, he never outgrew his generous
delight in any success that came to them; their ill-health and sorrow
were harder to bear than his own; and he shewed a child’s impulsive
generosity in offering all he had in comfort. Sympathy, help, experience
and advice were at hand for whosoever would take them: he had too long
lived precariously to forget the tragedy of those who failed and failed
again; he knew life too well to grow impatient with those who failed
through no one’s fault but their own.
Love of life, enduring to the end, knowledge of life, increasing every
day, combined to join this heart of a child to the experience of an
old man. As a connoisseur of food and wine, as of style and manner, he
belonged to a generation that ranked life as the greatest of the fine
arts. To lunch with him was to receive a liberal education in gastronomy,
though his course of personal instruction sometimes broke down for lack
of material: from time to time he would announce with jubilation that
he had discovered some rare vintage in some unknown restaurant; a party
would be organized to sample it, only to be informed that the last bottle
had been consumed by Mr. Teixeira the day before.
As an explorer, he remained, to his last hour, at the age when a
boy lingers rapturously before one shop after another, enjoying all
impartially, sharing his enjoyment with every passer-by, confident that
life is an unending vista of glittering shop-windows and that the day
must somehow be long enough for him to take them all in.