Among the lions of Rome during the last twenty years, not the least
attractive, especially for literary visitors, was the celebrated
Cardinal Mezzofanti. Easy of access to foreigners of every condition,
simple, unpretending, cheerful, courteous even to familiarity, he
never failed to make a most favourable impression upon his visitors;
and marvellous as were the tales in circulation concerning him, the
opportunity of witnessing more closely the exercise of his almost
preternatural powers of language, served but to deepen the wonder with
which he was regarded. The extent, the variety, and the solidity of
his attainments, and, still more, his complete and ready command, for
the purposes of conversation, of all the motley stores which he had
laid up, were so far beyond all example, whether in ancient or modern
times, as not only to place him in the very first rank of the
celebrities of our generation, but to mark him out as one of the most
extraordinary personages recorded in history.
Giuseppe (Joseph) Mezzofanti was born at Bologna in 1774, of an
extremely humble family. His father was a poor carpenter; and the
eminence to which, by his own unassisted exertions, Mezzofanti,
without once leaving his native city, attained in the exercise of the
faculty of language--which is ordinarily cultivated only by the
arduous and expensive process of visiting and travelling in the
different countries in which each separate language is spoken--is not
the least remarkable of the many examples of successful 'pursuit of
knowledge under difficulties,' which literary history supplies. He was
educated in one of the poor schools of his native city, which was
under the care of the fathers of the celebrated Congregation of the
Oratory; and the evidence of more than ordinary talent which he
exhibited, early attracted the notice of one of the members of the
order, to whose kind instruction and patronage Mezzofanti was indebted
for almost all the advantages which he afterwards enjoyed. This good
man--whose name was Respighi, and to whose judicious patronage of
struggling genius science is also indebted for the eminent success of
the distinguished naturalist Ranzani, the son of a Bolognese barber,
and a fellow-pupil of Mezzofanti--procured for his young protégé the
instruction of the best masters he could discover among his friends.
He himself, it is believed, taught him Latin; Greek fell to the share
of Father Emmanuel da Ponte, a Spanish ex-Jesuit--the order had at
this time been suppressed; and the boy received his first initiation
into the great Eastern family of languages from an old Dominican,
Father Ceruti, who, at the instance of his friend Respighi, undertook
to teach him Hebrew. Beyond this point, Mezzofanti's knowledge of
languages was almost exclusively the result of his own unassisted
study.
From a very early age, he was destined for the church, and he received
holy orders about the year 1797. During the period of his probationary
studies, however, he obtained, through the kindness of his friend F.
Respighi, the place of tutor in the family of the Marescalchi, one of
the most distinguished among the nobility of Bologna; and the
opportunities for his peculiar studies afforded by the curious and
valuable library to which he thus enjoyed free access, may probably
have exercised a decisive influence upon his whole career.
His attainments gradually attracted the notice of his fellow-citizens.
In the year 1797, he was appointed professor of Arabic in the
university; a few years later, he was named assistant-librarian of the
city library; and in 1803, he succeeded to the important chair of
Oriental Languages. This post, which was most congenial to his tastes,
he held, with one interruption, for a long series of years. In 1812,
he was advanced to a higher place in the staff of the library; and in
1815, on the death of the chief librarian, Pozetti, he was appointed
to fill his place. When it is considered how peculiarly engrossing the
study of languages is known to be, and especially how attractive for
an enthusiastic scholar like Mezzofanti, it might be supposed that for
him the office of librarian could have been little more than a nominal
one. But the library of Bologna to the present day bears abundant
evidence that it was far otherwise. The admirable order in which the
Greek and Oriental manuscripts are arranged, the excellent _catalogue
raisonné_ of these manuscripts, and the valuable additions to the
notices of them by Assemani and Talmar which it contains, are all the
fruit of Mezzofanti's labour as librarian.
During his occupancy of this office, too, he continued to hold his
professorship of Oriental languages, and, for a considerable part of
the time, that of Greek literature in addition. Nor was he exempt from
those domestic cares and anxieties which are often the most painful
drawback upon literary activity. The death of a brother, which threw
upon him the care of an unprovided family of eleven children, was the
severest trial sustained in Mezzofanti's otherwise comparatively quiet
career; and by driving him to the ordinary expedient of distressed
scholars--that of giving private lectures--it tended more than all his
public occupations to trench upon his time, and to abridge his
opportunities of application to his favourite study.
Perhaps, indeed, of all who have ever attained to the same eminence in
any department which Mezzofanti reached in that of languages, there
hardly ever was one who had so little of the mere student in his
character. In the midst of these varied and distracting occupations,
he was at all times most assiduous in his attendance upon the sick in
the public hospitals, of which he acted as the chaplain. There was
another also of his priestly duties, for the zealous discharge of
which he was scarcely less distinguished, and which became subsidiary,
in a very remarkable way, to his progress in the knowledge of
languages. In the absence, up to the present time, of any regular
memoir of him, it is impossible to fix with precision the history of
his progress in the acquisition of the several languages. But it is
well known, that at a very early period he was master of all the
leading European languages, and of those Oriental tongues which are
comprised in the Semitic family. Very early, therefore, in
Mezzofanti's career, he was marked out among the entire body of the
Bolognese clergy as in an especial manner the 'foreigners' confessor'
(_confessario dei forestieri_). In him, visitors from every quarter of
the globe had a sure and ready resource; and in several cases, it was
to the very necessity thus created he was indebted for the
acquisition, or at least the rudimentary knowledge, of a new language.
More than once, it occurred that a foreigner, introduced to the
_confessario dei forestieri_, for the purpose of being confessed,
found it necessary to go through the preliminary process of
_instructing his intended confessor_. For Mezzofanti's marvellous and
almost instinctive power of grasping and systematising the leading
characteristics even of the most original language, the names of a few
prominent ideas in the new idiom sufficed to open a first means of
communication. His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every
word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very
exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance in
the study; and, above all, a faculty which seemed peculiar to himself,
and which can hardly be described as other than instinctive, of
seizing and comprehending by a single effort the general outlines of
the grammatical structure of a language from a few faint
indications--as a comparative anatomist will build up an entire
skeleton from a single bone--enabled him to overleap all the
difficulties which beset the path of ordinary linguists, and to
attain, almost by intuition, at least so much of the required language
as enabled him to interchange thought with sufficient freedom and
distinctness for the purposes of this religious observance, which is
so important in the eyes of Catholics. And he used to tell, that it
was in this way he acquired more than one of his varied store of
languages. For it will hardly be believed, that this prodigy of the
gift of tongues had never, till his forty-eighth year, travelled
beyond the precincts of his native province; and that, up to the
period of his death, his most distant excursion from Rome, in which
city he had fixed his residence in 1832, did not exceed a hundred
miles--namely, to Naples, for the purpose of visiting the Chinese
College which is there established.
It is true that at the period of which we speak, Bologna lay upon the
high-road to Rome, and that travellers more frequently rested for a
space upon their journey, than in these days of steam-boat and railway
communication. But, even then, the opportunities of intercourse with
foreign-speaking visitors in Bologna were few and inconsiderable
compared with the prodigious advances which, under all his
disadvantages, Mezzofanti contrived to make. The ordinary European
languages presented but little difficulty; the frequent passings and
repassings of the allied forces during the later years of the war,
afforded him a full opportunity of acquiring Russian; and the
occasional establishment of Austrian troops in Bologna, brought him
into contact with the motley tongues of that vast empire--the Magyar,
the Czechish, the Servian, the Walachian, and the Romani; but beyond
this, even his spirit of enterprise had no vent in his native city;
and all his further conquests were exclusively the result due to his
own private and unassisted study.
His fame, nevertheless, began to extend to foreign countries. Among
many distinguished foreigners to whose acquaintance his extraordinary
faculties as a linguist became a passport, was the celebrated Russian
general, Suwarrow; and with him Mezzofanti long maintained the most
friendly relations. From the Grand-Duke of Tuscany he received a
pressing invitation to fix himself at Florence; and Napoleon himself,
with that engrossing spirit which desired to make Paris the centre of
all that is great in science, in art, and in literature, offered him a
most honourable and lucrative appointment, on condition of his
removing to the French capital. But Mezzofanti declined both the
invitations, and continued to reside in his native city, till the year
1832. At the close of those political disturbances, of which Bologna
was the centre, in the early part of the pontificate of Gregory XVI.,
it was resolved to send a deputation to Rome on the part of the
citizens. Of this deputation, Mezzofanti, as the chief celebrity of
the city, was naturally a leader; and the pope, who had long known
him, and who, before his elevation to the pontificate, had frequently
corresponded with him on philological subjects, urged him so earnestly
to remain at Rome, that with all his love of Bologna he was induced to
consent. He was immediately appointed, in 1832, a canon of St Peter's;
and on the translation of the celebrated Angelo (now Cardinal) Mai to
the office of secretary of the Propaganda, he was named to succeed
him in the honourable post of librarian of the Vatican.
In this office Mezzofanti continued till the year 1840, when, in
conjunction with the distinguished scholar just named, he was raised
to the cardinalate. During the interval since his fixing his residence
at Rome, he had enjoyed the confidence and friendship of Gregory XVI.;
and although his narrow resources were utterly unequal to the very
considerable expense which the state of a cardinal entails, Gregory,
in acknowledgment of his distinguished merit, himself settled the
necessary income upon the humble Bolognese; and even, with
characteristic delicacy, supplied from his own means the equipage and
other appurtenances which a new cardinal is obliged to provide on
entering upon his office.
From this period, Mezzofanti continued to reside at Rome. Far,
however, from relaxing in the pursuit of his favourite study after his
elevation, he only used the opportunities thus afforded for the
purpose of cultivating it with more effect. When the writer of these
pages first had the honour of being presented to him, he was in the
full flush of the excitement of a new study--that of the language of
the California Indians, two of whom had recently come as pupils to the
College of the Propaganda; and up to his very last year, the same zeal
continued unabated. His death occurred March 16, 1849, in the
seventy-fifth year of his age, and was most probably hastened by the
excitement and distress caused by the political troubles of the
period.
Such is a brief outline of the quiet and uneventful career of this
extraordinary man. It remains that we give a short account of the
nature and extent of his prodigious attainments as a linguist. It is
observed by the author of an interesting paper read a few weeks since
at a meeting of the Philological Society, that, taking the account of
the linguistic accomplishments of King Mithridates even in the most
exaggerated form in which it is given by the ancients, who represent
him as speaking the languages of twenty-two nations, it fades into
insignificance in contrast with the known and ascertained attainments
of Mezzofanti. A Russian traveller, who published in 1846 a collection
of _Letters from Rome_, writes of Mezzofanti:--'Twice I have visited
this remarkable man, a phenomenon as yet unparalleled in the learned
world. He spoke eight languages fluently in my presence. He expressed
himself in Russian very purely and correctly. Even now, in advanced
life, he continues to study fresh dialects. He learned Chinese not
long ago. I asked him to give me a list of all the languages and
dialects in which he was able to express himself, and he sent me the
name of GOD written with his own hand in _fifty-six_ languages, of
which thirty were European, not including their dialects; seventeen
Asiatic, also without counting their dialects; five African, and four
American!' We should add, however, from the cardinal's own avowal to
ourselves, that of the fifty-six languages here alluded to, there were
some which he did not profess to speak, and with which his
acquaintance was more limited than with the rest; an avowal the
honesty of which will be best appreciated when it is considered, on
the one hand, how difficult it would have been to test his knowledge
of the vast majority among these languages; and, on the other, how
marvellously perfect was his admitted familiarity with those which he
did profess really to know.
The author of the memoir submitted to the Philological Society, has
collected a number of notices of Mezzofanti by travellers in Italy,
who had seen him at different periods of his career. Mr Stewart Rose,
in 1817, tells of him that a Smyrniote servant, who was with him,
declared that he might pass for a Greek or a Turk throughout the
dominions of the Grand Seignior. A few years later, while he was still
residing at Bologna, he was visited by the celebrated Hungarian
astronomer, Baron Zach, editor of the well-known _Correspondences
Astronomiques_, on occasion of the annular eclipse which was then
visible in Italy. 'This extraordinary man,' writes the baron, February
1820, 'speaks thirty-two languages, living and dead--in the manner I
am going to describe. He accosted me in Hungarian, with a compliment
so well-turned, and in such excellent Magyar, that I was quite taken
by surprise. He afterwards spoke to me in German, at first in good
Saxon, and then in the Austrian and Swabian dialects, with a
correctness of accent that amazed me to the last degree, and made me
burst into a fit of laughter at the thought of the contrast between
the language and the appearance of this astonishing professor. He
spoke English to Captain Smyth, Russian and Polish to Prince
Volkonski, with the same volubility as if he had been speaking his
native tongue.' As a last trial, the baron suddenly accosted him in
_Walachian_, when, 'without hesitation, and without appearing to
remark what an out-of-the-way dialect had been taken, away went the
polyglot with equal volubility;' and Zach adds, that he even knew the
Zingller or gipsy language, which had long proved a puzzle to himself.
Molbech, a Danish traveller, who had an interview with him in 1820,
adds to his account of this miraculous polyglotist, that 'he is not
merely a linguist, but is well acquainted with literary history and
bibliography, and also with the library under his charge. He is a man
of the finest and most polished manners, and at the same time, of the
most engaging good-nature and politeness.'
It would be easy to multiply anecdotes, shewing the enthusiasm with
which Mezzofanti entered on the study of language after language. He
sought out new tongues with an insatiable passion, and may be said to
have never been happy but when engaged in the mastering of words and
grammars. No degree of bad health interrupted his pursuit. Till the
day of his death, he was engaged in his darling task: life closed on
him while so occupied. He died just as he had acquired a thorough
proficiency in Californian--a singular instance of the power of mind
exercised on a favourite subject, and shewing what may be accomplished
when men set their heart on it. The career of this remarkable
linguist, however, cannot be considered exemplary. We would recommend
no person to plunge headlong into an absorbing passion for any
accomplishment. Mezzofanti was a curiosity--a marvel--the wonder of
the world of letters; and it is chiefly as such that a notice of him
here will be considered interesting.