The Poetical and Musical Recollections of Charles MacFarlane

In this richly woven essay, Emre Aracı traces the poetic and musical echoes within the lost memoirs of Charles MacFarlane—Scottish traveller, author, and forgotten witness to the Ottoman Empire. What begins as a chance rediscovery of a withdrawn library book becomes a journey across time, conjuring memories of Donizetti Pasha’s Constantinople, the scentless roses of Keats, and Shelley’s Naples sunsets. Through MacFarlane’s overlooked reminiscences, Aracı revives a world of cultural intersections, nostalgic melodies, and literary ghosts, gently illuminating how even a long-silenced voice can still sing through the pages of time.

It was in the profound hush of my library, as the afternoon sun filtered gently across the shelves, that my hand reached once more for an old volume. Its pages, yellowed and faded on the anvil of time, bore the indelible traces of damp and dust, preserving within them the pale memories of a now-forgotten past. On the inside cover, an Ex Libris label, elegantly affixed, immediately caught my eye. At its centre was a noble coat of arms, encircled by a Latin motto of quiet dignity. “Vim Promovet Insitam”, it read: a brief yet resonant phrase, drawn from the fourth ode of Horace, and translated as, “Education fosters the power inherent within us”. This aphorism had been adopted by one of England’s venerable institutions of higher learning, Bristol University. 

The modest volume in my hand, published in 1917, had clearly once been a distinguished guest upon the university’s library shelves, preserved there for many years with all due reverence. Yet in time, with changing needs and the onward march of digitisation, its fate took another turn. A stamp repeated across the title page and elsewhere bore silent witness: “Withdrawn”, removed, in other words, from the library’s collection.

"The modest volume in my hand, published in 1917, had clearly once been a distinguished guest upon the university’s library shelves", (© Emre ARACI)

Who can say how many other such volumes were similarly discarded, then sold at auction or through a second-hand bookseller, until this one, by some meandering course, found its way to my own modest and personal library? And now, a century on, this book, perhaps once bearing the fingerprints of an idealistic youth, speaks to me anew through the quiet wisdom of its motto.

This time, it comes not as a relic, but as the quiet herald of a new journey, lending its voice to the opening lines of an Andante magazine article.

Reminiscences of a Literary Life brings together the recollections of the Scottish writer and traveller Charles MacFarlane, who lived between 1799 and 1858. The fate of this elegant volume, like that of its author, seemed entrusted to the vagaries of time and chance. In his final years, MacFarlane endured financial hardship, residing within the dignified confines of the Charterhouse almshouse in London, a venerable charitable institution that, to this day, retains its historic atmosphere. It was there that he penned these memoirs, yet he was never able to see them published during his lifetime.

Charterhouse in London, a venerable charitable institution that, to this day, retains its historic atmosphere

It was only much later that another sensitive soul, John F. Tattersall, happened upon the manuscript in a second-hand bookshop and rescued it from oblivion. With a preface of his own, he entrusted MacFarlane’s reminiscences to the literary world through the distinguished London publishers John Murray in 1917, thus restoring to life, nearly a century later, a voice almost lost to history. So it was that the traces of a forgotten pen, long surrendered to the silence of time, were brought once more into the light, thanks to the faithful hand of another.

I often invoked MacFarlane’s name during the years in which I was writing my biography of Donizetti Pasha and presenting concerts on the theme of European music at the Ottoman Court, whether in articles, in spoken pre-concert introductions or in the programme notes that accompanied each performance. It was through his book Constantinople in 1828 that I first encountered him among the many European travellers who had passed through the city. Though his observations are couched in a tone characteristic of the Orientalist temperament of his age, and not without a measure of prejudice, I was nevertheless struck by the vividness of his descriptions and the historical moment they captured. 

MacFarlane spent sixteen months in Constantinople, from the middle of 1827 to the close of 1828; a time when Sultan Mahmud II was vigorously pursuing his reformist agenda, culminating in the Vaka-i Hayriye, or “Auspicious Incident”, which saw the dissolution of the Janissary Corps and the birth of a modernised Ottoman army.

Sultan Mahmud II, (Henri-Guillaume Schlesinger)

It was during these same months that Giuseppe Donizetti arrived in Constantinople, taking up residence in Pera and assuming his post as Instructor General of Imperial Music. Although his name never appears in MacFarlane’s pages, it is not unreasonable to suppose that their paths might have crossed. One passage in particular, near the close of the first volume, caught my attention. MacFarlane writes: “Between the arsenal and Galata. Not far from the waterside, we passed an open square, where some tacticoes were drilling, and a large barrack, where the band of the regiment was practising a march from Rossini, under the direction of an old purblind Italian”.

Could this Italian, viewed through the prejudiced lens of his time, have been Donizetti himself, newly charged with the task of reforming the musical life of the Ottoman military? MacFarlane’s tone softens somewhat in the second volume, where he affords a more generous assessment of the musical progress he observed: “I have mentioned hearing, shortly after my arrival, a band of the tactico regiments practising a piece of Rossini’s music; but these were now common sounds at Constantinople, and the band of the imperial guard could already play several little things in a very respectable manner”.

Thus, even without naming him, MacFarlane bears indirect witness to the early fruits of Donizetti’s labour, an Italian maestro whose silent influence was already beginning to resonate through the parade grounds of imperial Constantinople. 

The sounds that rise, still trembling quietly between the lines of MacFarlane’s memoirs, from the Constantinople of two centuries ago are not confined merely to Rossini’s sprightly marches. For one day, quite unexpectedly, the Scottish author heard in the heart of the city a melody long buried in the silence of the years, one that had remained lodged somewhere in the recesses of his childhood. Finding himself utterly alone in the midst of a Turkish crowd, he suddenly became aware that the band of the Sultan’s guards had begun to play an old English air. The tune stirred within him a flood of long-dormant memories, transporting him at once to distant places, Italy, old friendships, and the mist-laden hills of Scotland. The moment was so piercing in its emotional clarity that MacFarlane recorded it with rare poignancy:

Charles MacFarlane, 1832,
(William Brockedon)

“It was agreeably striking to stand alone in the midst of these Turks, and to listen to well-known strains, that recalled Italy, and many pleasant scenes and dear friends; but this was nothing to the delights, fully melancholy sensations, I experienced one morning, when the band of the guards struck up an old English air I had not heard for many years, but which I immediately recognised as having been familiar to me in early life. I could not recall the places where I had heard it, but it must have been in my own country, and in the society of my earliest friends; it sounded to my ear like the voice of one of those friends, and it brought before my eyes ‘their familiar faces’, and the kind hearts of my childhood, and the faint, dubious reflex of many a scene in Scotland and England”. So profound was the effect of this unexpected musical encounter that MacFarlane confessed: “When the music changed, I would have given anything for the air to be continued. I could have listened to it the whole day through”.

And so it is that, after all these years, I too, while turning the pages of Reminiscences of a Literary Life, began to hear again those distant yet familiar voices—as though they were the half-faded strains of a melody once imprinted upon childhood memory.

For hidden amidst MacFarlane’s fine observations during his sixteen months in Constantinople, details often precise yet emotionally restrained, were subtler traces that his literary recollections quietly illuminate: traces of writers and poets who passed, silently and unrecorded, through the corridors of his life. These I had never encountered before, and they stirred in me a gentle, almost giddy excitement of discovery.

Suddenly, I found myself poised on the threshold of a moment lost among the strata of time, transported to Rome, to that melancholy yet graceful house just beside the Spanish Steps, the Keats–Shelley Memorial, which I had visited years ago. I could almost hear the whisper of the past in its still rooms, as I ascended the worn stone stairs in silence, listening for what remains unsaid but forever felt. Before arriving in Constantinople, Charles MacFarlane had spent eleven years in Naples and had travelled extensively throughout Italy. It was there that he encountered the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—quite by chance—before he had any notion of the young man’s identity. They met before the statue of Agrippina in the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples. The delicate, melancholic figure who stood beside him in quiet contemplation would later be revealed to him as none other than Shelley himself.

A profound conversation followed, and together they wandered through the museum galleries, eventually spending a day in Pompeii, walking among the silent remnants of the ancient world. Shelley’s fragile spirit seemed to tremble with ineffable sensitivity in the presence of both art and nature.

MacFarlane would later recall the moment they watched the sun set in silence, a moment that would give birth to Shelley’s verses later published under the title Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples.

The chance encounter would leave an indelible mark on MacFarlane’s memory. That very evening, as they left the museum, fate intervened once more, and they unexpectedly crossed paths with Rossini. Such were the strange and luminous convergences of MacFarlane’s Italian years.

MacFarlane also met John Keats during this same period. Despite the poet’s frail health, it was his moral courage and unflinching sincerity that left the deepest impression on him. Keats, contrary to the cruel insinuations of the literary critics of his day, was not broken by their censure, but by the tuberculosis he had inherited from his family. When he arrived in Italy, he still entertained hopes of recovery, but it was not to be. He would die in Rome at the age of twenty-five.

"Suddenly, I found myself transported to Rome, to that melancholy yet graceful house just beside the Spanish Steps, the Keats–Shelley Memorial, which I had visited years ago", (photo © Emre ARACI)

Keats travelled to Naples in the autumn of 1820, already in the final stages of his illness. According to MacFarlane, one day, walking along the road to Capo di Monte with his friend Charles Cottrell, he was enchanted by the sight of a rose garden blooming before a villa. Cottrell plucked a bouquet and presented it to him, but when Keats found them without fragrance, his disappointment was palpable. With characteristic vehemence, he exclaimed: “Humbugs! They have no scent! What is a rose without its fragrance? I hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a man or woman!”.

The anecdote captures Keats’s visceral honesty, his demand for authenticity not only in art and nature, but in human character. Both his poetry and his unvarnished integrity remained vividly etched in MacFarlane’s memory, and they coloured his recollections with a quiet reverence that endured long after the voices themselves had faded into history.

Sir Walter Scott,
(Sir Henry Raeburn)

Charles MacFarlane also had the opportunity, as a child, to meet none other than Sir Walter Scott. That first encounter, in which he shook the great man’s hand, was for MacFarlane a moment of inexpressible joy: the transformation of childhood adoration into tangible reality. Years later, when the Sultan’s band in Constantinople began to play a melody that may well have been familiar to him since boyhood, it is tempting to imagine that cherished memories of Shelley, Keats or perhaps even Scott, stirred once more in his mind.

Yet the sounds of the East were by no means confined to Rossini marches or English airs. Despite the reforms of Sultan Mahmud II, the fierce and ancient tones of the bands of the Janissaries, still echoed through corners of the empire. On one such occasion in Smyrna (modern-day Izmir), MacFarlane found himself listening to the band of a local pasha, and what he heard was, unmistakably, Janissary music.

That day, the pasha and his suite sat sedately beneath an awning on one side of the square, splendidly attired in oriental costume, with rich turbans and flowing robes of bright and various colours. Overlooking the scene, as if presiding from a throne atop the mountain, stood the old castle of Smyrna, more imposing still. These were public holidays for much of the Moslem population, and on such grand days, the band played almost incessantly, music resounding through the square without pause.

Unlike the Sultan in Constantinople, who had introduced Italian music into the band of the imperial guards, this provincial pasha had made no such overtures toward Europeanisation. Here, “music, instruments, and performers were all truly Turkish and Asiatic”. The colossal drums, very different in both shape and sound from those of Europe, were accompanied by curious long flutes held vertically, not horizontally, emitting the shrillest, most piercing sounds. These were joined by “grating, cracked, screaming trumpets, that positively tear the ear of an unaccustomed European”.

 "The fierce and ancient tones of the bands of the Janissaries", published in Arif Mehmed Pasha’s "Mecmu’a-i Tesavir-i Osmaniye"

To MacFarlane, the airs were “primitively simple and monotonous”, and yet, when heard from the surrounding hills, they sometimes possessed “a wildness and plaintiveness” not without charm.

Strangely, they often recalled to his mind the old Scottish mountain music, the Highland airs and the distant call of the bagpipes. Like them, he confessed, this music was best heard “at a sufficient distance”.

As much as the sounds of the East, it was also its appearance that left a lasting impression on Charles MacFarlane. Upon his return to London, he was frequently mistaken for a foreigner owing to his outward appearance. He had not yet shaved off his Ottoman-style moustache; he wore a red fez with a tassel, and his garments were a curious amalgam of items gathered in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Naples. His publisher, John Edward Otley, referred to this eclectic attire as a “geographical costume,” remarking that it bore traces of every corner of the globe. On one occasion, in his haste to prepare for a riding engagement in Hyde Park, MacFarlane failed to notice that he had put on two mismatched boots: one a refined Neapolitan design, the other a broad, square-toed model, fabricated by a Greek in Pera. While Otley found the incident mildly embarrassing, MacFarlane himself was unbothered; his thoughts were then wholly consumed with the manuscript of his first travel book on Turkey.

And now, two centuries later, thanks to John F. Tattersall, I find myself reading anew MacFarlane’s poetry-laced recollections alongside Constantinople in 1828, his musical, deeply personal impressions of the city, veiled behind a gossamer curtain woven with the indelible shadows of Shelley, Keats and Scott.

And I believe once again in the quiet truth that education refines the hidden gem within the soul. For in these pages, I seem to hear, rising softly from the past, the voice of an old friend, a melody long forgotten yet strangely familiar, echoing still...

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Seyyah Charles MacFarlane'ın Şiir ve Müzik dolu Anıları’ in the July 2025 issue (No. 225) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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