To be “modern,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in 1893, meant discovering a balance between seemingly oppositional energies: analysis and fantasy. “Modern,” he explained, “is the dissection of a mood, a sigh, a scruple; and the modern is the instinctive, almost somnambulistic surrender to every revelation of beauty, to a harmony of colours, to a glittering melody, to a wondrous analogy” (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991, 71). If this sounds like as clear a summary of A la recherche as we could wish, its origins need to be traced back to New England and to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson is an elusive presence in Proust's writing. We might express surprise that he appears there at all. For if Emerson was a clarion call declaring America's literary independence from the Old World, an iconoclast who would smash “the sepulchres of the fathers,” and a voice in the Concord wilderness rousing his fellow countrymen and women to demand, “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not tradition” (EL, 7), what earthly use could a neurotic young man growing up in the hothouse atmosphere of Paris, the seeming antithesis of everything for which Emerson's robust New England pragmaticism stood, make of such a manifesto?

The differences between the two men seem overwhelming: “optimism versus disenchantment, moralism versus art for art's sake, transcendentalism versus impressionism” (Virtanen 1977, 123). If such binaries suggest the advantages lay all on Emerson's side, it did not necessarily appear so at the time. Henry James for one commented on Emerson's life lacking “color,” that it gave the reader an “impression of paleness.” More damning in comparison with a work as singularly teeming as A la recherche (not to mention James's own fictions), it was a life “curiously devoid of complexity … passions, alternations, affairs, adventures.”