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 of histories and biographies for the Museum;137 his learning and mental development during this intense period of composition is registered in the many reviews of historical and natural philosophical treatises he had been reading. But it is also to be registered in dream essays like this one, which repeat that reading in small. Akenside’s dream vision is overrepresented by people who would have been called the “moderns,” including several members of the New Philosophy. Bacon takes his place near Fame, displacing Columbus. The dreamer insists that the “Discovery of a new World” was “but a slender Acquisition of crude Materials” that are “improv’d and perfected in that immense World of Human Knowledge and Human Power … discover’d” by the natural philosopher. Galileo, Harvey, Newton, and Locke are also seated there, with Milton and Pope. Except for a brief scuffle among comic authors, ending the dream by waking the dreamer, the essay concludes with the relatively elaborated entrance of Milton, the “blind, old Man,” who enters with the “Air of an ancient Prophet,” supported (and emblematically represented) by the “Genius of England.” Milton is the last to enter, and hence is seated at the end of the table. But in the way that the essay strives to order its materials, in fact to put disordered public materials into the greater order of the dream space, the mutability of Milton’s position, and indeed of fame generally, is corrected in the discourse which accompanies his entrance; the dreamer’s “Conductor” insists that Milton will “continually ascend … in the Goddess’s Favour,” in order “at last [to] obtain the highest, or at least the second Place in these her Solemnities.” Joseph Warton celebrated the essay as among the Akenside’s chief accomplishments, a signal example of his particularly curatorial mind. “The guests,” he notes, “are introduced and ranged with that taste and judgment which is peculiar to the author.”138 Like the “throne of the goddess” of Modern Fame itself, which is “composed of different Materials, laid up in a beautiful Architectonick Manner,” the dream means elegantly to order mental materials according to a single, attenuated idea. And these guests, in the style of a battle of the books, are personifications of the biographies and histories Akenside had been reading.
This dream, and Milton’s place in it, help signal what made Hollis’s gift so welcome. Dry as this dream is, it offers a full portrait of Akenside in his cognitive bed. Eve’s bed is haunted by Satan, but Milton’s bed (like Akenside’s, which it was to become) is inhabited by crowds of poets, authors, thinkers, and statesmen. It is the place where collections of things, whether by reading or the wide way of the senses, are posed in meaningful arrangements and returned to language. Wordsworth is unfair in claiming that because the scholar in his cabinet “drinks the spirit breathed / From dead men” that the scholar must therefore be of “their kind”; it is through conference with the dead that poets like Akenside found themselves most fully inspired. What Akenside inherited from Locke and Milton was in the end a set of convictions about language as metaphor, sustaining distinctions between body and mind, even while guaranteeing the embeddeness of ideas in haptic experience. This is what caused it to resonate for Akenside, for the bed was the very site where Milton was reputed to have done his most exacting cognitive work.
CASE 2
DESIGN
4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet
Exhibit 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura
Let us, then, let fall the curtains of Milton’s bed, and return for a moment to the dark room that John Locke carried around in his head. Locke mentions it in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while discussing the origins of knowledge; “external and internal sensation,” he insists,
are the only passages … of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much