To love Thee, is happiness.”
M. d’Abbadie, as also his Highness Prince Lewis L. Bonaparte, to whom M. d’Abbadie submitted it, had some doubt as to the propriety of the form, ‘zu servitzea,’ ‘zu maitatzea’; both of them preferring to write zure. But, as the dialect in which the sentence is written is that of Guipuscoa, both his Highness and M. d’Abbadie have kindly taken the trouble to refer the question to native Guipuscoan scholars; and I have had the gratification to learn by a letter of M. d’Abbadie, (January 18th, 1858,) that “the construction ‘zu servitzea,’ is perfectly correct in Guipuscoan.”
M. d’Abbadie subjoins, that, in addition to the authority of his friend, M. Dassance, for the Cardinal’s knowledge of Basque, he has since been assured by a Spanish lady, a native of San Sebastian, the capital of Guipuscoa, that the Cardinal had also conversed with her in her native Guipuscoan dialect. Moreover, when M. Manavit saw him in Rome in 1846, he translated freely in his presence a newly published Basque catechism, which M. Manavit presented to him on the part of the Bishop of Astros: and several distinguished Biscayan ecclesiastics assured M. Manavit that the Cardinal spoke both the dialects of Basque with equal fluency.[512] In a word, it appears impossible to doubt the complete success of this, one of his latest essays in the acquisition of a new language.
As the object of this biography, however, is not merely to bring together such marvels as these, but to collect all the materials for a just portraiture of the linguist himself, I must place in contrast with these truly wonderful narratives, the judgments of other travellers, in order that the reader may be enabled to modify each by comparison with its pendant, and to form his own estimate from a just combination of both.
It must be confessed, as a set off against the wonders which have been just recounted, that there were others of Mezzofanti’s visitors who were unable to see in him any of these excellencies. I think, however, that these depreciatory judgments will be found for the most part to proceed from ignorant and superficial tourists, and from those who are least qualified to form an accurate estimate of the attainments of a linguist. One of the heaviest penalties of eminence is the exposure which it involves to impertinent or malevolent criticism, nor is it wonderful that one who received so great a variety of visitors as did Mezzofanti, should have had his share of this infliction.
Mrs. Paget, a Transylvanian lady, married to an English gentleman, who saw Mezzofanti a little before M. d’Abbadie, is cited by Mr. Watts.[513] Her characteristic is rather recklessness and ill-breeding than positive malevolence. But as her strictures, ill-bred as they are, contain some facts which tend to illustrate the main subject of inquiry, I shall insert them without abridgment.
“Mezzofanti entered, in conversation with two young Moors, and, turning to us, asked us to be seated. On me his first appearance produced an unfavourable impression. His age might be about seventy; he was small in stature, dry, and of a pale unhealthy look. His whole person was in monkey-like restless motion. We conversed together for some time. He speaks Hungarian well enough, and his pronunciation is not bad. I asked him from whom he had learned it; he said from the common soldiers at Milan. He had read the works of Kisfaludi and Csokonai, Pethe’s Natural History, and some other Hungarian books, but it seemed to me that he rather studies the words than the subject of what he reads. Some English being present, he spoke English with them very fluently and well; with me he afterwards spoke French and German, and he even addressed me in Wallachian; but to my shame I was unable to answer. He asked if I knew Slowakian. In showing us some books, he read out from them in Ancient and Modern Greek, Latin and Hebrew. To a priest who was with us, and who had travelled in Palestine, he spoke in Turkish. I asked him how many languages he knew: ‘Not many,’ he replied, ‘for I only speak forty or fifty.’ Amazing incomprehensible faculty! but not one that I should in the least be tempted to envy; for the empty unreflecting word-knowledge, and the innocently exhibited small vanity with which he was filled, reminded me rather of a monkey or a parrot, a talking machine, or a sort of organ wound up for the performance of certain tunes, than of a being endowed with reason. He can, in fact, only be looked upon as one of the curiosities of the Vatican.
“At parting, I took an opportunity of asking if he would allow me to present an Hungarian book to the Vatican library. My first care at my hotel was to send a copy of M. W.’s book, ‘Balitéletekröl’ (‘On Prejudices’)[514] to the binder, and a few days afterwards I took it, handsomely bound in white leather, to Mezzofanti, whom I found in a hurry to go and baptize some Jews and Moors. As soon as he saw the book, without once looking into it, even to ascertain the name of the author, he called out, ‘Ah! igen szép, igen szép, munka. Szepen van bekötve. Aranyos, szép, szép, igen szép, igen koszönöm.’ (Ah! very fine, very fine, very finely bound. Beautiful, very fine, very fine, thank you very much;)—and put it away in a book-case. Unhappy Magyar volumes, never looked at out of their own country, but by some curious student of philology like Mezzofanti, and in their own country read by how few!”
Now, in the first place, in the midst of this lady’s supercilious and depreciatory strictures, it may safely be inferred, that Mezzofanti’s Hungarian at least must have been unexceptionable, in order to draw from one so evidently prejudiced, the admission that he “spoke it well enough,” and that “his pronunciation was not bad.” Lest, however, any doubt should be created by these grudging acknowledgments, I shall quote the testimony of a Hungarian nobleman, Baron Glucky de Stenitzer, who met the Cardinal in Rome some years later, in 1845. The Baron not only testifies to the excellence of his Magyar, but affirms “that, in the course of the interview, his Eminence spoke no less than four different dialects of that tongue—the pure Magyar of Debreczeny, that of the environs of Eperies, that of Pesth, and that of Transylvania!”
In like manner, though Madame Paget takes upon her to say, that “the Cardinal studies the words rather than the subject of what he reads,” Baron Glucky found him “profoundly versed in the laws and constitution of Hungary”; and when, in speaking of the extraordinary power enjoyed by the Primate of Hungary, the Baron chanced to allude to his privilege of coining money, his Eminence promptly reminded him that “this privilege had been withdrawn by the Emperor Ferdinand, and even quoted the year of the edict by which it was annulled!”[515]