King, Georgiana Goddard: A brief account of the military orders in Spain (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1921)

IN SPAIN
119
Urraca at Santiago that a great corporate
body takes up men into itself and remakes
them in its own image. As D. Diego
Gelmirez at Compostplla from a poor clerk,
the servant of the Count and Countess,
became the superb Archbishop, Apostolical
and Primatial, so the Master who began as
intruso, and lived to fight and to lose
against a later intruso, was remoulded by
the Order to its service utterly.
The Master who began as the villain of a
one chronicle play, ends as the protagonist
of a second part: Chamiso will grow glo-
rious likewise in part the third. So long
as history related events and presented
portraits, a man was good or bad, nor
changed his colour before the bitter end.
History to-day, since it offers neither
events nor figures, only a vague welter of
movements and tendencies, inextricable
and indistinguishable, has bettered nothing
here: but those who turn the dusty pages
of old chronicles in search of life and
emotion, of human motive and conscious
or unconscious state-craft, may care to
observe how a man can begin as a low sort
An
impersonal
force
remoulding
men
History not
portraiture
only
nor only
record of
tendencies
but a drama
of men’s
spirits
AND MONOGRAPHS