THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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preserved statues, as in the fairytale of the strange city of brass, situated in the desert between Egypt and Morocco, and filled with corpses and treasures: ‘When the
emir Musa saw this, he stood still and praised Allah, the Supreme Being, honoured him and contemplated the beauty of the palace, the weight of its construction and
the magnificent perfection of its distribution.’ Everything judged or announced or even bragged about in this way lies in the wishful line which finally leads to the palace
of Aladdin, to the conviction of the beholders that nothing could be built to compare with it in the whole world. And however much half­preserved Greek and Roman
cities in the desert which had formed around them contributed to the oriental fairytale of castles and cities, it is still clearly always the architecture of its own epoch
which is completed by this kind of literary Fata Morgana. It is instructive here that the fictional edifices of all ages take a substantial part of their lustre from the miniature
or ornamental world of existing architecture; for these small forms inherently gave more concentrated expression even to the artistic aspiration of their style. A piece of
Persian chased work ornamentally surpasses the gateway of a mosque, and a monstrance, a tabernacle, a baldachin above the figure on a pillar are even more Gothic
than a cathedral. Thus the miniature, which contained as it were the mosque or cathedral seen as remote, small and sharp on the horizon, provided special material
precisely for the formation of literary essence. The influence of the ornamental world is recognizable in the Arabian Nights by the unrestrained use of gold and precious
stones, of ivory lattices and stained­glass windows. This kind of thing becomes even clearer in the dream buildings of medieval epic poetry, in the secular ones and all
the more so in the consecrated ones. Namely whenever fairytale images of a legendary kind are sprinkled into this epic poetry. The temple of the Grail in Wolfram's
‘Titurel’ appears as one big reliquary, chased like the latter and yet as huge as a cathedral, sumptuous, indeed esoteric even in its materials. Its walls and roofs are gold
and enamel, the windows are crystal and beryl, molten blue glass is poured into the golden roof­tiles, emeralds form the keystones, and the boss on the tower is a
carbuncle which illuminates the forest paths at night and guides those who have lost their way. The whole description is hyperbolic, and yet it presents proper
architecture: that of the castle in the air of Gothic design, driven to its ultimate Gothic conclusion. And once again of course a historical contact is not lacking here, as
with the castles of jewels and cities of brass in the oriental fairytale, a contact which for its part gives a magic form to the style of the period. If Arabian dream buildings
continued to be influenced