The sum of his production is slight: the inconsiderable villancicos, three eclogues, two elegies, an epistle, five highly elaborated songs, and thirty-eight Petrarchan sonnets. Small as is his work in bulk, it cannot be denied that it was like nothing before it in Castilian. Auzías March, no doubt, had earlier struck a similar note in Catalan, and Garcilaso, who seems to have read everything, imitates his predecessor's harmonies and cadences. His trick of reminiscence is remarkable. Thus, his first eclogue is plainly suggested by Tansillo; his second eclogue is little more than a rendering in verse of picked passages from the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro; while the fifth of his songs—La Flor de Gnido—is a most masterly transplantation of Bernardo Tasso's structure to Castilian soil. And almost every page is touched with the deliberate, conscious elegance of a student in the school of Horace. In simple execution Garcilaso is impeccable. The objection most commonly made is that he surrenders his personality, and converts himself into the exquisite echo of an exhausted pseudo-classic convention. And the charge is plausible.
It is undeniably true that Garcilaso's distinction lacks the force of real simplicity, that his eternal sweetness cloys, and that the thing said absorbs him less than the manner of saying it. He would have met the criticism that he was an artificial poet by pointing out that, poetry being an art, it is of essence artificial. That he was an imitative artist was his highest glory: by imitating foreign models he attained his measure of originality, enriching Spain, with not merely a number of technical forms but a new poetic language. Without him Boscán must have failed in his emprise, as Santillana failed before him. Besides his technical perfection, Garcilaso owned the poetic temperament—a temperament too effeminately delicate for the vulgarities of life. As he tells us in his third eclogue, he lived, "now using the sword, now the pen:"—
"Tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma."
But the clank of the sabre is never heard in the fiery soldier's verse. His atmosphere is not that of battle, but is rather the enchanted haze of an Arcadia which never was nor ever could be in a banal world. As thus, in Wiffen's version:—
"Here ceased the youth his Doric madrigal,
And sighing, with his last laments let fall
A shower of tears; the solemn mountains round,
Indulgent of his sorrow, tossed the sound
Melodious from romantic steep to steep,