Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/149

 takes the side of Plato against Locke. Lockism is the influx of 'decomposition and prose,' while Platonism means growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; the 'so-called scientific' is the negative and poisonous. Spenser, Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and 'the dull men will be Lockists.'

The average American had fallen into such 'Lockism,' and Emerson, when he came to England, found the fully-blown type flourishing and triumphant. The 'brilliant Macaulay,' he said, represented the spirit of the governing classes, and Macaulay had explicitly declared (in his essay on Bacon) that 'good' meant simply solid, sensual benefits—good food and good clothes and material comfort. Emerson does not argue with men in whom the faculty of vision is non-existent or clouded by want of use. He is content simply to see. One result is indicated in the charming correspondence with Carlyle. Each most cordially appreciated the merits of the other, and Carlyle, like Emerson, called himself a 'mystic,' and soared above 'Lockism.' But the visions of the two took a very different colouring. Emerson praises Sartor Resartus with a characteristic qualification. Carlyle's grim humour and daring flights of