age that words must express definite things. In common with his age
he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So the
consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and
from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of
his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of
their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The
pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the
note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to
this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable
without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of
tongue-tied queerness in a normal world.

If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of
grace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the
courage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his
fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before
that courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October evening
in 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet
the question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le retablissement des arts et des
sciences a contribue a epurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his
eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mystery
about this 'revelation.' For the first time the question had been put
in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made his
reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of
talent.

The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it
than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had
won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was
surely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence
of progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him.
'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigue, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
donna la premiere assurance veritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact,
not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because
he was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in
the pr