ABSTRACT
On a tour of Europe and the Near East in the winter of 1856-1857, Herman Melville fi lled a journal with impressions of his travel. Long regarded as of value chiefl y for indications of its writer’s state of mind at the apparent end of his prose-writing career, this journal also contains a record of Melville’s remarkably wide and informed aesthetic interests. In fact, Basem Ra’ad has recently hailed the journal as a crucial source for the study of Melville’s aesthetics for its “observations on a range of natural and man-made structures, on landscapes, on cities and religious sites, and on architecture, gardening, sculpture, and painting-observations . . . instinct with signifi cance for the development of artistic expression during a transitional phase in the last century” (200). It is true that Melville’s disdain for the “rascally priests” inside the grand mosque is prominent in the journal (they demanded baksheesh and seemed to be “selling the fallen mosaics”); but he was at least as interested in the neighborhood of fi ne Saracenic architecture he passed through on his way to the mosque (Journal 59). Despite Ra’ad’s invitation to reconsider the journal’s value as a window into Melville’s aesthetic interests in the diffi cult middle years of his career, many of Melville’s notes in the journal seem inescapably subjective, mixed with phrases and attitudes familiar from his published works. Like Ishmael to the masthead, for example, Melville
climbed the Serasker Tower and raved about the view and the visual perspective gained over the crowded, labyrinthine streets below. The subterranean “grove of marble pillars” of the cistern of Philoxenus, which he found being used as a sweatshop where imp-like boys sat twisting silk amidst the spinning jennies, struck him as a “palatial sort of Tartarus,” a phrase that recalls his “Tartarus of Maids” of the year before. Like Ishmael in New Bedford, Melville skulked through the Galata district as a wary outsider, recording the impression that each house hid a suicide hanging from the rafters (59-61).1
