A Year's Work in the Seventies

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The year's work may be considered as a motto of our Association. I doubt whether it would be approved as a motto to be inscribed on a coat-of-arms, if we ever cared to have one. Since our claim is to be both modern and humane, I think we can rely on our motto being sanctioned by the thirty-two volumes of the rear's Work in Modern Language Studies, as well as by the forty-four volumes of the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature and by our latest venture, the rearbook of English Studies. I would not call the presidency of the Association a year's work, though it certainly is a yearly distinction. I must confess that when such a distinction unexpectedly befell me and I consequently found myself blown into mid-air by the presidential wind, like a barren leaf, wondering where I would land, the motto of the Association came to my mind at once. It reminded me of my humble, though possibly rightful origins, namely of my very small contribution to the rear's Work in Modern Language Studies some twenty years ago, and it seemed to inspire me with a much needed sense of purpose and hope in my search of a worthy subject for a presidential address. Why not a year's work in the early seventies? Of course not in the nineteen-seventies. It is not for the president to foresee, much less to influence the work of the Association. Apart from constitutional niceties, it is the privilege as well as the curse of age that one should become blind to the present. Like the damned souls in Dante's Hell, old people are normally long-sighted. Thanks to God, we are not long-sighted in respect of the future, as the damned souls seem to be. We are, up to a point, in respect of the past, which increasingly dominates us, whether we like it or not. Personally, as a veteran student of the Italian Renaissance, I should have chosen the early seventies of either the fourteenth century, say the last years of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the fifteenth century, say the first steps of Lorenzo de' Medici as a ruler of Florence, or even better the sixteenth century, say 157I-2, the year of the battle of Lepanto, where a great Spaniard, Cervantes, fought, and of the night of Saint Bartholomew, where a prominent French scholar, Ramus, was killed. The trouble was that such places were familiar to me because I had been working there in a different capacity throughout my life: they were my worm-holes. In fact there could be no doubt as to where I should land as a falling leaf: it ought to be in the early eighteen-seventies. As president of a scholarly association I may be expected to give an account of what I stand for. That simply means where I come from. My Italian predecessors, Benedetto Croce, President of the Association in 1923-4, and Professor Migliorini, President in 1956, both of whom I revere as masters, will exempt me from answering a personal question. As a student of literature, Croce succeeded Francesco De Sanctis, the greatest nineteenth-century Italian critic. Similarly, as a student of language, Professor Migliorini would certainly acknowledge Graziadio Ascoli, the founder of Italian Philology, as his master. De Sanctis's fundamental history of