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.
In truth, the real young man of that Revolution, as of our own Revolution, was Lafayette. His convictions regarding the rights of man were essentially the same as those held by Robespierre and St. Just; but they were convictions that grew out of the inherent geniality, benevolence, and rectitude of his nature, and were accordingly guided and limited in their application by the sanity and sweetness of the sentiments whence they drew their vitality. Whilst they made him capable of any self-sacrifice for freedom and humanity, they made him incapable of crime; and misfortune and failure never destroyed his faith in freedom, because his faith in freedom had not been corrupted by experience in blood.
In Nero and Caligula, in Alcibiades and Byron, in Robespierre and St. Just, we have attempted to sketch the leading perversions of youthful energy and intelligence. Let us now proceed to exhibit their more wholesome, and, we trust, their more natural action. And first, in respect to the emotions, these may all be included in the single word enthusiasm, or that impulsive force which liberates the mental powers from the ice of timidity as Spring unloosens the streams from the grasp of Winter, and sends them forth in a rejoicing rush. The mind of youth, when impelled by this original strength and enthusiasm of Nature, is keen, eager, inquisitive, intense, audacious, rapidly assimilating facts into faculties and knowledge into power, and above all teeming with that joyous fulness of creative life which radiates thoughts as inspirations, and magnetizes as well as informs. Now the limit of this youth of mind observation decides to be commonly between thirty-five and forty; but still it is not so properly marked by years as by the arrest of this glad mental growth and development. In some men, like Bacon and Burke, it is not arrested at sixty. The only sign of age, indeed, which is specially worth considering, is the mental sign; and this is that gradual disintegration of the mind's vital powers by which intelligence is separated from force, and experience from ability. Experience detached from active power is no longer faculty of doing, but mere memory of what has been done; and principles accordingly subside into precedents, intuitions into arguments, and alertness of will into calculation of risks. The highest quality of mind, the quality which stamps it as an immortal essence, namely, that power, the fused compound of all other powers, which sends its eagle glance over a whole field of particulars, penetrates and grasps all related objects in one devouring conception, and flashes a vivid insight of the only right thing to be done amid a thousand possible courses of action,—the power, in short, which gives confidence to will because it gives certainty to vision, and is as much removed from recklessness as from irresolution,—this power fades in mental age into that pausing, comparing, generalizing, indecisive intelligence, which, however wise and valuable it may be in those matters where success is not the prize of speed, is imbecile in those conjunctures of affairs where events match faster than the mind can syllogize, and to think and act a moment too late is defeat and ruin.
It is for this reason that the large portion of history which relates to war is so much the history of the triumphs of young men. Thus, Scipio was twenty-nine when he gained the Battle of Zana; Charles the Twelfth, nineteen when he gained the Battle of Narva; Condé, twenty-two when he gained the Battle of Rocroi. At thirty-six, Scipio the younger was the conqueror of Carthage; at thirty-six, Cortés was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty, Charlemagne was master of France and Germany; at thirty-two, Clive had established the British power in India. Hannibal, the greatest of military commanders, was only thirty, when, at Cannæ, he dealt an almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only twenty-seven, when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneralled and defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria. And in respect to the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, what are they but the record of old generals beaten by young generals? And it will not do to say, that the young generals were victorious merely in virtue of their superiority in courage, energy, and dash; for they evinced a no less decisive superiority in commonsense and judgment,—that is, in instantaneous command of all their resources in the moment of peril, in quickness to detect the enemy's weak points, and, above all, in resolute sagacity to send the full strength of the arm to second at once the piercing glance of the eye. The old generals, to be sure, boasted professional experience, but, having ossified their experience into pedantic maxims, they had less professional skill. After their armies had been ignominiously routed by the harebrained young fellows opposed to them, they could easily prove, that, by the rules of war, they had been most improperly beaten; but their young opponents, whose eager minds had transmuted the rules of war into instincts of intelligence, were indifferent to the scandal of violating the etiquette of fighting, provided thereby they gained the object of fighting. They had, in fact, the quality which the old generals absurdly claimed, namely, practical sagacity, or, the Yankee phrased it, "the knack of hitting it about right the first time."
We cannot, of course, leave the subject of young military commanders without a reference to Alexander of Macedon, in many respects the greatest young man that ever, as with the fury of the untamable forces of Nature, broke into history. But even in the "Macedonian madman," as he is called, it will be found that fury obeyed sagacity. A colossal soul, in whom barbaric passions urged gigantic powers to the accomplishment of insatiable desires, he seems, on the first view, to be given over to the wildest ecstasies of imaginative pride; but we are soon dazzled and confounded by the irresistible energy, the cool, clear, fertile, forecasting intelligence, with which he pursues and realizes his vast designs of glory and dominion. Strong and arrogant as the fabled Achilles, with a military genius which allies him to Cæsar and Napoleon, he was tortured by aspirations more devouring than theirs; for, exalted in his own conception above humanity by his constant success in performing what other men declared impossible, he aimed to conquer the world,—not merely to be obeyed as its ruler, but worshipped as its god. But this self-deified genius, who could find nothing on our planet capable of withstanding his power, was mortal, and died, by what seemed mere accident, at the age of thirty-two,—died, the master of an empire, conquered by himself, covering two millions and a half of square miles,—died, in the full vigor of his faculties, at the time his brain was teeming with magnificent schemes of assimilating the populations of Europe and Asia, and of remaking man after his own image by stamping the nature of Alexander on the mind and feelings of the world.
One incident, the type of his career, has passed into the most familiar of proverbs. When, in his invasion of Asia, he arrived at Gordium, he was arrested, not by an army, but by something mightier than an army,—namely, a superstition. Here was the rude wagon of Gordius, the yoke of which was fastened to the pole by a cord so entangled that no human wit or patience could untwist it; yet the oracle had declared that the empire of Asia was reserved to him alone by whom it should be untied. After vainly attempting to overcome its difficulties with his fingers, Alexander impatiently cut it with his sword. The multitude applauded the solution; he soon made it good by deeds; and, in action, youth has ever since shown its judgment, as well as its vigor, in thus annihilating seemingly hopeless perplexities, by cutting Gordian knots.
In passing from the field of battle to the field of politics, from young men as warriors to young men as statesmen, we must bear in mind that high political station, unless a man is born to it, is rarely reached by political genius, until political genius has been tried by years and tested by events. At the time Mr. Calhoun's influence was greatest, at the time it was said that "when he took snuff all South Carolina sneezed," he was really not so great a man as when he was struggling for eminence. Statesmen are thus forces long before they are leaders of party, prime-ministers, and presidents; and are not the energies employed in preparing the way for new laws and new policies of more historic significance than the mere outward form of their enactment and inauguration? Thus, it required thirty-five years of effort and agitation before the old Earl Grey of 1832 could accomplish the scheme of Parliamentary reform eagerly pressed by the young Mr. Grey of 1797. The young Chatham, when he was merely "that terrible cornet of horse," whose rising to speak in the House of Commons was said to give Sir Robert Walpole "a pain in the back,"—when, in his own sarcastic phrase, he "was guilty of the atrocious crime of being a young man,"—was still day by day building himself up in the heart and imagination of the English people, and laboriously opening the path to power of the old Chatham, whose vehement soul was all alive with the energies of youth, though lodged in the shattered frame of age. And he so familiarly known to the American people as old John Adams,—did he lose in mature life a single racy or splenetic characteristic of the young statesman of the Colonial period? Is there, indeed, any break in that unity of nature which connects the second President of the United States with the child John Adams, the boy John Adams, the tart, blunt, and bold, the sagacious and self-reliant, young Mr. Adams, the plague and terror of the Tories of Massachusetts? And his all-accomplished rival and adversary, Alexander Hamilton,—is he not substantially the same at twenty-five as at forty-five? Though he has not yet imprinted his mind on the constitution and practical working of the government, the qualities are still there:—the poised nature whose vigor is almost hidden in its harmony; the power of infusing into other minds ideas which they seem to originate; the wisdom, the moderation, the self-command, the deep thought which explores principles, the comprehensive thought which regards relations, the fertile thought which devises measures,—all are there as unmistakably at twenty-five as on that miserable day, when, in the tried completeness of his powers, the greatest of American statesmen died by the hand of the greatest of American reprobates.
But there are also in history four examples of men who seem to have been statesmen from the nursery,—who early took a leading part in great designs which affected the whole course of human affairs,—and whom octogenarians like Nesselrode and Palmerston would be compelled to call statesmen of the first class. These are Octavius Cæsar, more successful in the arts of policy than even the great Julius, never guilty of youthful indiscretion, or, we are sorry to say, of youthful virtue; Maurice of Saxony, the preserver of the Reformed religion in Germany, in that contest where his youthful sagacity proved more than a match for the veteran craft of Charles the Fifth; the second William of Orange, the preserver of the liberties of Europe against the ambition of Louis XIV., and who, as a child, may be said to have prattled treaties and lisped despatches; and William Pitt, Prime-Minister of England at the age of twenty-four, and stereotyped on the French imagination as he whose guineas were nearly as potent as Napoleon's guns.