The Texan Scouts A Story Of The Alamo And Goliad - Livres de poche

To ALFRED SUTRO I reclicate to you this slight trilx te to the memory of our friend. You were the luckier, in knowing him the l o c - I r .5 llall I e rnore than colltent if you find, in reading this I ook, as I found in reading his letters g a i r th, a t Ile has returned to us cveu for a moment and that a whim of his language or a11 echo of his Iatlghter has recreated the triple alliance which he four ded. 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 surpriw that life prelerve3 for us. Now I dont think I can be astonished any more. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos 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 I yoil write my Lift and Lcttt. rs . . ., but his modesty and his humour n. ould have been pcrtiirbcd in cc unl mcasure by the vision of a solemn biography and a low-voiced press. 1 was a little bit underpraised before, he oncc confessed Im being a little bit overpraised no., Since the best of himself vent imprirtially intoall that he wrote, his conscience could never be haunted by the rccollcction of shoddy workmanship, even in the davs bcfore he had a reputation to jeo parclizc nor, ivhcn he had won recognition, could his head be turned by the announcement that he had created a masterpiece. If he cnjoycd the consciousness of having filled the English treasury n. ith the literary spoils of six countries, hc dissembled his enjoyment. In SO far ns he ivished to be remembered at all, i t vns not as a man of letters, but as a friend, n connoissciir of life, a man of sympathy unaging and zest unstaled, a lover of simplc jcsts, a I, ughingp hilosopher. Of their chnr i ty, hc vished those 11-ho lo, ed Ilinl to 11a e masscs said for the repose of his soul he . 0111 1 h i-e C C I I tortured by the thought that, in life or death, he hnrl brought unhappiness 2 Alexander Teixeira de Mattos 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 ltitti tude to life. If there had been no Alice in Wonder-Innd, 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, incriticism 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 fellotvs. . . . I t is the purpose of this sketch to present one 3 apostle as he revealed himself to one of his ti isciplcs...