operation of the soul (see, for example, Exhibits 4 and 11). The palace, presence chamber, throne room, and so on, have multiply stood for the relationship between reason and the fancy—so much so that the image becomes by Akenside’s moment a commonplace, indeed a commonplace that Akenside expected his readers to visualize while reading. Perhaps Akenside is repeating a poetic technique he learned from Raphael, “delineating” his “spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” This pattern in any case emerges for Akenside as a consistent conceptual trope, a coordinating condition governing the operations of imagination; the imagination under its curatorial aspect is marked by its return to a collection of ideal objects—as they rise or are arranged under the poet’s review.
For Locke, metaphor governs the progress of sensations to abstracts; for Akenside, it governs the movement whereby abstracts are returned to sensation. The “complicated resemblance existing between … the material and immaterial worlds,” as Akenside elsewhere avers, “is the foundation of metaphor,” and in his poetics metaphor itself is repeatedly put to the task of imagining this resemblance.130 The most embracing of these images is, for Akenside, the “palace” with its ideal objects on review. Naturally, then, when Akenside encounters an epistemological crux, he follows the path worn by Raphael; he follows the route of metaphor back to the ground of intellection, tracing his way from difficult questions of process back to images drawn from the material world. He returns concepts, via the return-route of metaphor, to their material affordances. This is the great power of his poetry, which seeks sensory, bodily marked experience as the proper site for intellectual work. He therefore rediscovers the subterranean tendency of Locke’s epistemology to insist on the material origins of intellect, indeed on mind and reason rising into being simply from the hoarding up of material impressions. So, for instance, when Akenside offers a portrait of a young poet, we receive a virtual summary of Locke’s theory of the mind as the entelechy of its material impressions, his story of how the powers of the intellect and its self-awareness emerge out of the accrual of ideas. The young poet gathers and retains images no less accurately than “th’ expanse / of living lakes” reflects “the bord’ring shade and sun-bright heav’ns” or than “the sculptur’d gold … keeps the graver’s lively trace.”131 These are clearly unequal examples, held together only by Akenside’s syntax—but taken together they offer images of the mind’s image-making and -storing capacities; combined, they offer a description of the “mixt treasures” over which the “child of fancy oft in silence bends,” and the very working of the mind as an organ of storage and manipulation. With the collection of such images, “the mind / Feels her young nerves dilate: the plastic pow’rs / Labour for action,” rising to self-awareness of its autotelic capacities in an obvious rehearsal of Locke’s remarks on judgment as an emergent property of the mind’s collection of ideas.
Like Locke’s ideal man, Akenside’s poet is limited to the sorting and variation of the “diff’rent forms” summoned up from memory—or, Akenside suggests, spontaneously offered up by memory itself. It is in this sense that “imagine” provides abstraction’s opposite. As a poet, Akenside suggests, reposes in the company of the images internal to his mind, a “design / Emerges” from the hurry of phantasms, and he “breathes / The fair conception … / Into its proper vehicle.” This provides a new, fully realized world of sensory rudiments, remediated in paper, paint, or clay, becoming “to eyes or ears / An object ascertained,” once again to be witnessed by a new observer. As readers, we arrive late. “Line by line, / And feature after feature,” Akenside insists, “we refer / To that sublime exemplar whence [poetry] stole / Those animating charms,” the “conception” or “abstraction” that the poet has “breathed” back into material being. The active work of imagination reverses the Lockean vector of intellect, for what Locke understands as the “abstraction” of “concepts” from images assembled in the imagination to words, names, species, and general ideas is returned by Akenside to the “picturing” of “conceptions” or “abstractions.” While Locke expects the mind to coordinate a kind of “transfer” or “metaphor” from image to idea, Akenside expects the imagination to articulate a “reference,” a “ferrying back” to the original experiences of the senses. From Locke’s “transfer” we have arrived at Akenside’s “refer.”132
Aside from the poetic epistle, there is no single conceit in the Museum more common than the dream. As a site of the Muses, the Museum is a collection of dream work. The dream, under the system elaborated by Akenside, offers a formal justification for the organization of images; dreams relay a sponsoring idea or conception through sensory materials. Moreover, it offers the promise of an arrangement seemingly in the absence of intention, the pure shifting of a moral truth or concept back into the material figures that might be thought to have produced it in the first place. Inspiration for poems like these emerges from outside the poet. Addison, for instance, falls asleep musing on a coin; he dreams the coin’s adventures (see Exhibits 12 and 21). Elsewhere, he falls asleep after reading a collection of letters about people deserving of fame; this offers the justification for his allegorical dream of the “Table of Fame” (Tatler 81), a vision of Fame’s allegorical high table of worthies. Akenside reads Addison’s “Table of Fame” just before drifting off to sleep—or so he says; his essay in the Museum is the record of the dream that followed. Each of these records a certain kind of inspiration—of the sort Hollis no doubt expected Akenside to experience in Milton’s bed. The notion is that a conception or extended idea gathered from an arrangement of objects in waking may, autotelically, generate a corresponding arrangement of objects for the delectation of the intellectual eye. This is creativity as a sort of borrowing, inspiration as abstraction from objects of the senses. The dream record, in the curatorial aesthetic of the eighteenth century, is the opposite of what we might expect; unencumbered by the demands of discourse or the requirements of polite form, it emerges as more methodical, more austerely systematic than the highly rhetorical performances of forms like the poetic epistle.133
Akenside’s dream begins with Akenside dozing over Addison’s essay; he has been “amused” with the “pleasing Manner in which” Addison has “introduced” fame and its subjects, dwelling in Addison’s vision until he “formed [his] own Mind” to “composure and stillness.” This composure is refigured in his dream as an “immense Plain,” where Akenside “walks” until he meets an allegorically overdetermined “Figure of great Dignity.” Thomas Campbell, writing in 1820, remarked on what he called the artificiality of Akenside’s “figures”; he insisted that Akenside’s “illustrations for the most part only consist in general ideas fleetingly personified.”134 This is certainly what is going on in Akenside’s dream essay; figures emerge as a function of the idea they are made to reproduce. This “Figure of great Dignity” is Akenside’s Muse, the figure of his inspiration; it leads him “immediately” to a “very spacious Building,” where a review of similar figures will be assembled. Here, the poet arrives to a sort of palace where will be put on review what he would later, in his Pleasures of Imagination, call the “frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms” of imagination work.135 Striking about the dream is the way that it strives to create order from disorder, proceeding from an odd mixture of ornaments and “innumerable Crowd[s] of People,” a confused and uncertain “Crowd of Figures,” to a severely ordered and numbered arrangement of historical persons seated in order around a table.136 The dream, once its sponsoring figure is introduced, does not vary from the single effort to arrange particular, historically real people around a single table, according to their varying celebrity. The dream in fact becomes more rather than less systematic as it wears on, perfecting the allegory as it assembles its figures. This is how Akenside’s imagination works; it arranges figures according to the design of an idea, or, put differently, a museum according to his Muse.
The full contours of the poetic process are on display in Akenside’s dream essays. “The Table of Modern Fame” is a straight form of the genre, taking its rise out of, and offering as though in epitome, the materials immediately at Akenside’s hand. Akenside had for several months been occupied compiling reviews
