Part 1

=Transcriber’s Note:= The chapter numbering in this book is as printed: there is no Chapter VIII and no Chapter XII.

TEX

[Illustration: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos]

TEX

A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

BY STEPHEN McKENNA

[Illustration]

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.

Printed in U.S.A.

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY Binghamton and New York

To ALFRED SUTRO

I dedicate to you this slight tribute to the memory of our friend. You were the luckier, in knowing him the longer. I shall be more than content if you find, in reading this book, as I found in reading his letters again, that he has returned to us even for a moment and that a whim of his language or an echo of his laughter has recreated the triple alliance which he founded.

I trust also you may be long without finding out the devil that there is in a bereavement. After love it is the one great surprise that life preserves for us. Now I don’t think I can be astonished any more.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: _Letters_.

TEX

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

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.

II

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.

III

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.