I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war.
I do not even mean the Papal conceptions about the Holy War.
I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City.
For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing was
a vision; something with which all stories stop, something where
the rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away.
In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not even
a castle in Spain. It was a castle east of the sun and west
of the moon, and the fairy prince could find it no more.
Indeed that idle image out of the nursery books fits it very exactly.
For its mystery was and is in standing in the middle, or as they
said in the very centre of the earth. It is east of the sun
of Europe, which fills the world with a daylight of sanity,
and ripens real and growing things. It is west of the moon of Asia,
mysterious and archaic with its cold volcanoes, silver mirror
for poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics.
Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of
the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest,
for the reason I have myself suggested.
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