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]