This interesting anecdote illustrates another curious phase of Mezzofanti’s marvellous faculty—the manner in which he dealt with a language, not only new to himself, but entirely unwritten, unsystematized, and, in a word, destitute of all the ordinary aids and appliances of study.
Two native Californians, children of one of the many Indian tribes of that peninsula, were sent to Rome to be educated at the Propaganda. One of these died not very long after his arrival; the other, whose native name was Tac, and who exhibited much more talent than his companion, lived in the Propaganda for about three years, but eventually sunk under the effects of the Roman climate, and perhaps, of the confinement and unwonted habits of collegiate life. To these youths, from the day of their arrival, Mezzofanti attached himself with all the interest which a new language always possessed for him.[479]
The Indians of the Californian peninsula are broken up into several independent tribes, the principal of which are three in number, the Picos, the Waicuros, and the Laymones. Their languages are as various as their subdivisions of race. In the days of the Spanish missionaries, there could hardly be found any two or three missions in which the same dialect was spoken;[480] insomuch that the fathers of these missions have never succeeded in doing for the native language, what they have done for most of the other languages of Northern and Central America—reducing it to an intelligible grammatical system.[481] Upon Mezzofanti, therefore, in his intercourse with these youths, devolved all the trouble of discovering the grammatical structure of the Californian language, and of reducing it to rules. It was a most curious process. He began by making his pupils recite the Lord’s Prayer, until he picked up first the general meaning, and afterwards the particular sounds, and what may be called the rhythm of the language. The next step was to ascertain and to classify the particles, both affixes and suffixes; to distinguish verbs from nouns, and substantives from adjectives; to discover the principal inflexions of both. Having once mastered the preliminaries, his power of generalising seemed rather to be an instinct than an exercise of the reasoning faculty. With him the knowledge of words led, almost without an effort, to the power of speaking.
I have been assured by the Rev. James Doyle, who was a student of the Propaganda at the time, and who had frequent opportunities of witnessing Mezzofanti’s conversation with these youths, that his success was complete, at least so far as could be judged from external appearance—from his fluency, his facility of speech, and all the other outward indications of familiarity.[482] Some time before the arrival of these Californians, and soon after Mezzofanti’s coming to Rome, Bishop Fenwick, of Cincinnati, had sent for education to the Propaganda two North American Indians, youths of the Ottawa tribe, then residing near Mackinaw, at the upper end of Lake Michegan. The elder of these, named Augustine Hamelin, was a half-breed, being the son of a French father; the younger, whose Indian name was Maccodobenesi, (“the Blackbird,”) was of pure Ottawa blood.[483] Unhappily, as almost invariably happens in similar circumstances, the Indian, although a youth of much promise and very remarkable piety, pined away in the College, and eventually died from the bursting of a blood-vessel. Augustin Hamelin, the elder, spent a considerable time in the Propaganda, where he studied with great success, but in the end, being seized with blood-spitting, the authorities of the College, apprehensive of a recurrence of the same disease which had befallen Maccodobenesi, judged it more prudent to send him back to America. In consequence, he rejoined his tribe in the year 1835, or 1836. Mrs. Jameson, who in her “Rambles among the Red Men,” speaks of the Roman Catholic Ottawa converts in general, as “in appearance, dress, intelligence, industry, and general civilization, superior to the converts of all other communions,” refers in particular to “a well-looking young man, dressed in European fashion and in black, of mixed blood, French and Indian, who had been sent, when young, to be educated at the Propaganda, and was lately come to settle as a teacher and interpreter among his people.”[484] This youth, there can be no doubt, was Hamelin. Having come soon afterwards to Washington, as one of a deputation from his tribe to negociate a treaty with the United States Government, he produced a great sensation by his high education, his great general knowledge, and especially his skill in languages; and on a subsequent occasion, in 1840, Bishop O’Connor, of Pittsburgh, who had known him in the Propaganda, and to whom I am indebted for these particulars regarding him, encountered him in Philadelphia, engaged in a similar mission to the American Government.
The well-known Indian philologer, M. du Ponceau, met him about the same time, and speaks with much praise of his intelligence and ability. It was from Hamelin that M. du Ponceau obtained the information regarding the Ottawa language which he has used in the comparative vocabulary of Indian languages, appended to his Memoire sur le Systeme Grammaticale des Langues Indiennes.[485]
Whether Mezzofanti learned the Ottawa dialect from these youths I have not positively ascertained. Indeed it is difficult to say at what precise time he first directed his attention to the Indian languages of North America. He certainly knew something of them before he left Bologna. He read for M. Libri, in 1830, a book in one of the Indian languages. Prince Lewis Lucian Bonaparte too, in a communication with which he has honoured me, mentions a conversation with him at Bologna, in which he spoke of these Indian languages, and alluded to one in particular in which the letter B is wanting; “not,” as he explained to the Prince, “on account of any peculiarity in the genius of the language which excludes this sound, but because the Indians of this tribe wear a heavy ornament suspended by a ring from the under lip, which by dragging the under lip downwards, and thus preventing its contact with the upper, renders it impossible for them to produce the sound of B or any other labial.” It is probable therefore, that even before he first met Hamelin and his companion, Mezzofanti had already learnt something of these Indian languages; and as, in his conversation with Dr. Kip, some years later, the only languages which he mentioned as known to him are the Chippewa, the Delaware, and the Algonquin, it is most likely that it was the first of these—a variety of which is spoken by the Ottawas—that formed his medium of conversation with these youths. On this point, Dr. O’Connor is unable to speak from his own knowledge.
The Indian language which he knew best, however, was the Algonquin, the parent of a large progeny of dialects; and this he learnt not from the natives, but from Father Thavenet, of the congregation of St. Sulpice, for many years a missionary among that tribe, and perhaps more profoundly skilled in their language[486] than any European scholar before his time. Of the Algonquin Mezzofanti became completely master—a success which can only be appreciated by those who understand the peculiar,[487] and to a European entirely novel structure of these languages.
But whatever uncertainty may exist as to the manner in which he acquired these particular languages, there are many others with regard to which it cannot be doubted that he turned most industriously to account, during these years, the many resources supplied by the Propaganda, and that to this noble institution he was indebted for many of his later acquisitions.
It may perhaps be remembered, that, when Dr. Tholuck saw him in 1830, and changed quite suddenly to Arabic in the midst of a conversation in German, although he replied in that language “without hesitation and quite correctly,” yet he “spoke very slowly, and, as it were, composing the words one with another.” Now Dr. O’Connor informs me, that, from the day of his first coming to the Propaganda, he “fastened upon” an Egyptian student named Sciahuan, with whom he conversed continually in Arabic; and that he also undertook (thus enjoying an opportunity of practice in two languages at once,) to instruct in it a young Maltese, likewise a student of the college. With what success this twofold practice was attended may be inferred from the fact, already recorded, that, a few years later, when M. d’Abbadie was in Rome (in 1839,) he was told by a native Syrian that Mezzofanti’s fluency, as well as his knowledge of Arabic, were both admirable.[488]