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.