The life of Cardinal Mezzofanti / With an introductory memoir of eminent linguists, ancient and modern

by Charles William Russell

As regards the dashing style in which this lady sets aside the Cardinal’s Magyar reading, which only embraced “the works of Kisfaludi and Czokonai, Pethe’s Natural History, and some other Hungarian books,” it may be enough for the reader to know that, without reckoning the “other Hungarian books,” the three works which she names thus slightingly, comprise no less than seven volumes of poetry and miscellaneous literature.

For what remains of her strictures upon the character of Mezzofanti—strictures be it observed, which she has the hardihood to offer, although her entire knowledge was derived from two interviews of a few minutes, among a crowd of other visitors—her charge of love of display, “empty word-knowledge,” “monkey-like” exhibition, and the other pettinesses of “small vanity,” the best commentary that can be offered is an account of the Cardinal published at this very period, by one who knew him intimately during a residence of many months in Rome, who was actually for a time his pupil or fellow student, and who, from his position, was thoroughly conversant, not only with the sentiments of the Cardinal’s friends and admirers, but with all the variety of criticisms to which, according to the diversity of tastes and opinions, his character and his gifts were subjected in the general society of the literary circles of Rome—I mean the amiable and learned Guido Görres. I may add that I myself was Herr Görres’s companion in one of his interviews with the Cardinal.

“If any one should imagine,” he writes, (in the Historisch-Politische Blätter,[516] of which, conjointly with Dr. Phillips, he was editor,) “that all the honours which he has received have produced the slightest effect upon his character or disposition, he is grievously mistaken. Under all the insignia of the cardinalate, Mezzofanti is still the same plain, simple, almost bashful, good-natured, conscientious, indefatigable, active priest that he was, while a poor professor, struggling by the exercise of his talents, in the humblest form, to gain a livelihood for the relatives who were dependant on his exertions. Although his head is stored with so many languages, it has never, as so frequently occurs to the learned, shown the least indication of lightness. As Prefect of the House of Catechumens he is merely of course, charged with the supervision of their instruction; but he still discharges the duty in person, with all the exactness of a conscientious schoolmaster. He visits the establishment almost every day, and devotes a considerable part of his income to the support of its inmates.

In like manner he still, as Cardinal, maintains with the Propaganda precisely the same relations which he held as a simple prelate. Although he is not bound thereto by any possible obligation, he devotes every day to the students of that institution, in summer an hour, in winter an hour and a half. He practises them and also himself in their several languages, and zealously avails himself of the opportunity thus afforded him, to exhort them to piety and to strengthen them in the spirit of their calling.

It is scarcely necessary to say that these youths regard their disinterested friend and benefactor with the most devoted affection....

When I spoke to him, one day, about his relations with the pupils, he said to me, ‘It is not as a Cardinal I go there; it is as a student—as a youth—(giovanetto.)’...

He is familiar with all the European languages. And by this we understand not merely the old classical tongues and the first class modern ones; that is to say, the Greek and Latin, the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and English; his knowledge embraces also the languages of the second class, viz. the Dutch, the Polish, Bohemian or Czechish, and Servian, the Hungarian, and Turkish; and even those of the third and fourth class—the Irish, Welsh, Albanian, Wallachian, Bulgarian, and Illyrian—are equally at his command. On my happening to mention that I had once dabbled a little in Basque, he at once proposed that we should set about it together. Even the Romani of the Alps, and the Lettish, are not unfamiliar to him; nay, he has made himself acquainted with Lappish, the language of the wretched nomadic tribes of Lapland; although he told me he did not know whether it should be called Lappish or Laplandish. He is master of all the languages which are classed under the Indo-German family—the Sanscrit and Persian, the Koordish, the Armenian, and the Georgian; he is familiar with all the members of the Semitic family, the Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Samaritan, Chaldee, Sabaic, and even the Chinese, which he not only reads but speaks. As regards Africa, he knows the Coptic, Ethiopic, Abyssinian, Amharic, and Angolese.”

Görres adds what I have already mentioned, as a characteristic mark of their affectionate gratitude, that forty-three of his Propaganda scholars waited upon him on occasion of his promotion to the Cardinalate, and addressed to him a series of congratulations, each in his native dialect. He fully bears out too, the assurance which has been repeated over and over again by every one who had really enjoyed the intimacy of the Cardinal, that, frequently as he came before the public in circumstances which seemed to savour of display, and freely as he contributed to the amusement of his visitors by exhibiting in conversation with them his extraordinary acquirements, he was entirely free from that vanity to which Madame Paget thinks proper to ascribe it all.

“With all his high qualifications,” says the Rev. Ingraham Kip,[517] a clergyman of the American episcopal church, “there is a modesty about Cardinal Mezzofanti which shrinks from anything like praise.” “It would be a cruel misconception of his character,” says Guido Görres, “to imagine that, with all the admiration and all the wonder of which he habitually saw himself the object, he yet prided himself in the least upon this extraordinary gift. ‘Alas!’ he once said to a friend of mine, a good simple priest, who, sharing in the universal curiosity to see this wonderful celebrity, apologized to the Cardinal for his visit by some compliment upon his European reputation:—‘alas! what will all these languages avail me for the kingdom of heaven, since it is by works, not words, that we must win our way thither!’”

In truth Cardinal Mezzofanti possessed in an eminent degree the great safeguard of christian humility—a habitual consciousness of what he was not, rather than a self-complacent recollection of what he was. He used to speak freely of his acquirement as one of little value, and one especially for which he himself had little merit—a mere physical endowment—a thing of instinct, and almost of routine. God, he said, had gifted him with a good memory and a quick ear. There lay the secret of his success—“What am I,” he would pleasantly say, “but an ill-bound dictionary!” “He used to disparage his gifts to me,” says Cardinal Wiseman; “and he once quoted a saying ascribed to Catherine de Medici, who when told that Scaliger knew twenty languages, observed, ‘that is twenty words for one idea! For my part I would rather have twenty ideas for one word!’” On one occasion, after the publication of Cardinal Wiseman’s Horæ Syriacæ, Mezzofanti said to him: “You have put your knowledge of languages to some purpose. When I go, I shall not leave a trace of what I know behind me!” And when his friend suggested that it was not yet too late, he “shook his head and said it was”—which he also repeated to Guido Görres, earnestly expressing his “regret that his youth had fallen upon a time when languages were not studied from that scientific point of view from which they are now regarded.” In a word, the habitual tendency of his mind in reference to himself, and to his own acquirements, was to depreciate them, and to dwell rather upon his own deficiency and short-comings, than upon his success.