omething 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. Because it had been a
popular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it had
been a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picture
in the imagination. For poor men are almost always particularists;
and nobody has ever seen such a thing as a mob of pantheists.
I have seen in some of that lost literature of the old guilds,
which is now everywhere coming to light, a list of the stage
properties required for some village play, one of those popular
plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild
of the shipwrights would build Noah's Ark or the guild of the barbers
provide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles.
The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colour
of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade;
a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the walls
and towers of Jerusalem. I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded
as a special feature, like the two tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummles.
But I can also imagine that towards the end of the Middle Ages,
the master of the revels might begin to look at those towers
of wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put them
away in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if it
is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding.
There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a
disposition to sulk about the Crusades. But though the popular
feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its
degree occur in the political realm that was purely practical.
The Moslem