Now neither in Byron's works nor Byron's life do we recognize the spirit of youth,--the spirit which elevates as well as stimulates, which cheers as well as inflames. Compare him in this respect with a man of vaster imagination and mightier nature,--compare him with Edmund Burke, in what we call Burke's old age; and as you read one of Burke's immortal pamphlets, composed just before his death, do you not feel your blood kindle and your mind expand, as you come into communion with that bright and broad intellect, competent to grapple with the most complicated relations of European politics,--with that audacious will, whose purposes glow with immortal life,--and especially with that large and noble soul, rich in experience, rich in wisdom, but richer still in the freshness, the ardor, the eloquence, the chivalrous daring of youth? Byron is old at twenty-five; Burke is young at sixty-six.
The spirit of youth may thus, as in the case of Byron, be burnt out of the young man by the egotism of passion; but it may also be frozen up in his breast by the egotism of opinion. Woe to the young shoulders afflicted with the conceit that they support old heads! When this mental disease assumes the form of flippancy, it renders a young person happily unconscious that Nature has any stores of wisdom which she has not thought fit to deposit in his cranium, or that his mind can properly assume any other attitude towards an opponent than that of placid and pitying contempt.
But this intellectual presumption, ridiculous in its flippant or pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is especially true of Robespierre and St. Just. Their hearts were hardened through their heads. The abstract notions of freedom and philanthropy were imbedded in their brains as truths, without being rooted in their characters as sentiments; and into the form of these inexorable notions they aimed to shape France. They were of course opposed by human nature. Opposition made them personally cruel, because it made them intellectually remorseless. With no instincts of humanity to guide their ideas of its rights, it was but natural that offended pride of opinion should fester into that malignant passion which puts relentlessness into the will. Everything and everybody that opposed the onward movement of the great cause ought, they conceived, to be removed. The readiest way to remove them was by tyranny, terror, and murder; for the swiftest method of answering objections is to knock out the brains that propound them. All the instituted rights of men were accordingly violated in the fierce desire to establish the abstract rights of man. A government founded on reason was to be created by a preliminary and provisional government founded on the guillotine. The ideals of Rousseau were to be realized by practices learned in the school of Draco; and a celestial democracy of thought was to spring from a demonized democracy of fact. Now we are accustomed to call these wretches young men. But there was no youth in them. Young in respect to age, their intellectually irritated egotism made them as bigoted, as inhuman, as soulless as old familiars of the Inquisition.