At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary’s office, but that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries.  Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope.  He was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.  The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations.  There were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau’s universe.  “The vilest tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind.  I must, in spite of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate.”  The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the inborn.  There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak.  There are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and active energy of muscle.  There are others who do so passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing.  The former by their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first condition, still go far.  The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery.  Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing.  For a time he sank.

It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into exaggerations.  The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious.  He told lies as readily as the truth.  He pilfered things to eat.  He cunningly found a means of opening his master’s private cabinet, and of using his master’s best instruments by stealth.  He wasted his time in idle and capricious tasks.  When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form.  The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed.  Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,