Perhaps also, although we have had many notices of his skill in Russian and Polish from a very early period, it may be satisfactory to subjoin the reports of one or two travellers who conversed with him in these languages during his latter years.
To begin with Russian. A traveller of that nation who twice visited him about this time, cited by Mr. Watts, describes him as “a phenomenon as yet unparalleled in the literary world, and one that will scarce be repeated, unless the gift of tongues be given anew, as at the dawn of Christianity.”
“Cardinal Mezzofanti,” he writes, “spoke eight languages fluently in my presence: he expressed himself in Russian very purely and correctly; but, as he is more accustomed to the style of books than that of ordinary discourse, it is necessary to use the language of books in talking with him for the conversation to flow freely. His passion for acquiring languages is so great, that even now, in advanced age, he continues to study fresh dialects. He learned Chinese not long ago; and is constantly visiting the Propaganda for practice in conversation with its pupils of all sorts of races. 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 in his own hand, in fifty-six languages, of which thirty were European, not counting their subdivision of dialects, seventeen Asiatic, also without reckoning dialects, five African, and four American. In his person, the confusion that arose at the building of Babel is annihilated, and all nations, according to the sublime expression of Scriptures, are again of one tongue. Will posterity ever see anything similar? Mezzofanti is one of the most wonderful curiosities of Rome.”[538]
In the end of the year 1845, Nicholas, the late Emperor of Russia, (who of course is an authority also on the Polish language,) came to Rome, on his return from Naples, where he had been visiting his invalid Empress. The history of his interview with the Pope, Gregory XVI., and of the apostolic courage and candour with which, in two successive conferences, that great pontiff laid before him the cruelty, injustice, and impolicy of his treatment of the Catholic subjects of his empire, is too well known to need repetition here.[539] It was commonly said at the time, and has been repeated in more than one publication, that the Pope’s interpreter in this memorable conference was Cardinal Mezzofanti. This is a mistake. The only Cardinal present at the interview was the mild and retiring, but truly noble-minded and apostolic, Cardinal Acton.
A few days, however, after this interview, M. Boutanieff, the Russian minister at Rome, wrote to request that Cardinal Mezzofanti would wait upon the Emperor; and a still more direct invitation was conveyed to him, in the name of the Emperor himself, by his first aide-de-camp. The Cardinal of course could not hesitate to comply. Their conversation was held both in Russian and in Polish. The Emperor was filled with wonder, and confessed that, in either of these languages it would be difficult to discover any trace of foreign peculiarity in the Cardinal’s accent or manner.[540] It is somewhat amusing to add, that the Cardinal is said to have taken some exceptions to the purity, or at least the elegance, of the Emperor’s Polish conversational style.
As regards the Polish language, however, the year 1845 supplies other and more direct testimonies than that of the Emperor Nicholas.
In an extract cited by Mr. Watts from the Posthumous Works of the eminent Polish authoress, Klementyna z Tanskich Hoffmanowa, who visited Rome in the March of that year, it is stated that “the cardinal spoke Polish well, though with somewhat strained and far-fetched expressions;” and that he was master of the great difficulty of Polish pronunciation—that of the marked l—“although he often forgot it.” This lady has preserved in her Diary a Polish couplet, written for her by the Cardinal with his own hand, under a little picture of the Madonna.
Ten ogien ktory żyia w sercu twoiem
O Matko Boża! zapal w sercu moiem.[541]
Another, and to the Cardinal far more interesting, representative of the Polish language appeared in Rome during the same year. Mezzofanti had long felt deeply the wrongs of his oppressed fellow-Catholics in Poland and Lithuania. A few months before the Emperor’s arrival in Rome, they had been brought most painfully under his eyes by the visit of a refugee of that vast empire, and a victim of the atrocious policy which had become its ruling spirit—the heroic Makrena Mirazylawski, abbess of the Basilian convent of Minsk, the capital of the province of that name. The organized measures of coercion by which the Emperor endeavoured to compel the Catholic population of Lithuania and Poland, and the other Catholic subjects of the empire, into renunciation of their allegiance to the Holy See, and conformity with the doctrine and discipline of the Russian church, comprised all the members of the Catholic church in Russia without exception, even the nuns of the various communities throughout their provinces. Among these was a sisterhood of the Basilian order in the city of Minsk, thirty-five in number. The bishop of the diocese and the chaplain of the convent, having themselves conformed to the imperial will, first endeavoured to bend the resolution of these sisters by blandishment, but in the end sought by open violence to compel them into submission. But the nobleminded sisters, with their abbess at their head, firmly refused to yield; and, in the year 1839, the entire community (with the exception of one who died from grief and terror) were driven from their convent, and marched in chains to Witepsk, and afterwards to Polosk, where, with two other communities equally firm in their attachment to their creed, they were subjected, for nearly six years, to a series of cruelties and indignities of which it is difficult to think without horror, and which would revolt all credibility, were they not attested by authorities far from partial to the monastic institute.[542] Chained hand and foot; flogged; beaten with the fist and with clubs; thrown to the earth and trampled under foot; compelled to break stones and to labour at quarries and earthworks; dragged in sacks after a boat through a lake in the depth of winter; supplied only with the most loathsome food and in most insufficient quantity; lodged in cells creeping with maggots and with vermin; fed for a time exclusively on salt herrings, without a drop of water; tried, in a word, by every conceivable device of cruelty;—the perseverance of these heroic women is a living miracle of martyr-like fidelity. Nine of the number died from the effects of the excessive and repeated floggings to which, week after week, they were subjected, three fell dead in the course of their cruel tasks; two were trampled to death by their drunken guards; three were drowned in these brutal noyades; nine were killed by the falling of a wall, and five were crushed in an excavation, while engaged in the works already referred to; eight became blind; two lost their reason; several others were maimed and crippled in various ways; so that, in the year 1845, out of the three united communities (which at the first had numbered fifty-eight) only four, of whom Makrena was the chief, retained the use of their limbs! These heroines of faith and endurance contrived at last to effect their escape from Polosk, from which place it had been resolved to transport them to Siberia; and, through a thousand difficulties and dangers, Makrena Mirazylawski made her adventurous way to Rome.