as a boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he surveyed the ruins.  But the certainty that he had once been certain, the memory and the desire of the past peace—­this they could not destroy.  They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.  Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of his 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 preface to Narcisse, ’maussade,