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!”