Garcilaso de la Vega

“ Thus the Laberinto, far from being a collection of frivolous or insignificant coplas, where the most we have to look for is artifice of style and rhyme, must be regarded as the production of a man learned in all the compass of science which that epoch permitted, and as the depository of all that was then known.
If the invention of this picture, which, without doubt, is the product of a comprehensive and philosophical mind, had belonged exclusively to our poet, his merit would be infinitely greater, and we must have conceded to him, in a plan so noble, the gift of genius. ”

“ Leads Garcilasso: on the green turf cast,
Here, midst the woods of this stupendous hill,
On various things I brood, not unperplexed by ill.
Yet leave I not the Muses, but the more
For this perplexity with them commune,
And with the charm of their delicious lore
Vary my life, and waste the summer noon;
Thus pass my hours beguiled; but out of tune
The lyre will sometimes be, when trials prove
The anxious lyrist: to the country soon
Of the sweet Siren shall I hence remove,
Yet, as of yore, the land of idlesse, ease, and love. ”

“ No Castilian poet has known how to draw from rural objects so many tender and melancholy sentiments: a turtle-dove, a hind, an oak thrown down, a fallen ivy, strike him, agitate him, and excite his tenderness and enthusiasm. The imitations of the ancients, in which his poems abound, are recast so naturally in his character and style, as to be entirely identified with him. It is a pity that to the purity of his language was not added greater study of elegance, which suffers at times from trivial words and prosaic expressions. ”

“ In this situation of things, the lyric poet should not appear a mortal like the rest of mankind; his agitation, his language, the numbers to which he reduced it, the music with which he sang it, the boldness of his figures, the grandeur of his conceptions,—all should concur to the consideration of him, in these moments of enthusiasm, as a supernatural being, an interpreter of the Divinity, a sibyl, and a prophet.
Such, in ancient times, was the character of the ode; which modern nations have since introduced into their poetry with more or less success. ”

“ Juan de Mena expresses himself generally with more fire and energy than delicacy and grace; his course is unequal; his verses at times are bold and resonant, at others, they grow weak for want of cadence and metre; his style, animated, vivid, and natural at times, occasionally borders on the turgid and the trivial: language, in fine, in his hands is a slave that he holds but to obey him, and follow willingly or by compulsion the impulse which the poet gives it. No one has manifested, in this way, either greater boldness or loftier pretension ”

“ Never has the inspiration of those Muses been invoked without the most signal advantage, not only to our literature, but our language. It softened, under Chaucer, the Saxon roughness of our early tongue; it ruled and regulated the cadences of Surrey and Wyatt, till from an uncouth and often arbitrary metre, our Poetry grew into proportion, harmony, and grace; it gave to the lyres of Spenser, Milton, Collins, and Gray, much of their compass, richness, and luxury of sound. ”

“ I will be bold to assert, that the poets, and readers of the poets of the day, will be no way degraded by coming in contact with his simplicity: our taste for the wilder flights of imagination has reached a height from which the sooner we descend to imitate the nature and unassuming ease of simpler lyrists—the Goldsmiths and Garcilassos of past ages, the better it may chance to be both for our poetry and language. ”

“ Such, though with less brilliancy and perfection, was the case with modern Italy, where in the midnight of the barbarous ages that succeeded Roman refinement, appeared on the sudden Dante and Petrarch, bringing with them the dawn of the arts and of good taste. Other nations, less fortunate, wrestle entire centuries with rudeness and ignorance, and become more slowly sensible to the blandishments of elegance and harmony; and perfection, in the degree that men can attain it, is conquered by them solely by force of time and toil. ”

“ The style and language of love must flow more easy and unencumbered, to be graceful and delicate. Thus Herrera, who, no doubt, loved with vehemence and tenderness, seems, in uttering his sentiments, to be more engaged about the manner of expressing them, than with the desire of interesting by them; and to this cause must be attributed, that, of the Spanish poets, he is the one whose love-verses are the least calculated to pass from lip to lip, and from nation to nation. ”

“ The severe simplicity and wrathful grandeur of Dante is already transfused with spirit and condensity. There is perhaps but one living poet possessed of an equal versatility of talent, of the same various powers of passionate description, fancy, wit, and whim, to transfuse the Proteus-spirit of Ariosto, the Prince of Romancers; and but one gifted with an equal feeling, melody, and charm of language, who could, with a graceful hand, pour out music and lamentation from the Urn of Petrarch: but they could do it to the life ”

“ Of the many distinguished men, to whom, in the enterprising reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain had the honour of giving birth, there are few perhaps much more admired by herself, or that come recommended to the notice of a stranger with so much interest as Garcilasso de la Vega. Whether considered as the cultivated spirit, who, shaking from the Spanish lute the dust of ages, imparted to it by the force of his genius, a more harmonious string and a more polished tone ”

“ The few that he has left are sufficient, notwithstanding, to give us an idea of his poetic character, superior to others for nobleness and chasteness of phrase, for novelty and choice of subject, for the force and vehemence of his enthusiasm and fancy, and for the excellency of a style always pure without affectation, elegant without superfluity, without tumidity magnificent, and adorned and rich without ostentation or excess. A merit which particularly distinguishes him is the happy success with which he constructs his periods, which neither grow dull from brevity, nor cumbrous from prolixity ”

“ In the whole compass of poetry, I do not remember a more delicate image than the following:—
"All with dishevelled hair were seen to shower
Tears o'er the nymph, whose beauty did bespeak
That Death had cropt her in her sweetest flower,
Whilst youth bloomed rosiest in her charming cheek;
Near the still water, in a cypress bower,
She lay amongst the green herbs, pale and meek,
Like a white swan that, sickening where it feeds,
Sighs its sweet life away amidst the reeds."
The second eclogue is decidedly inferior to the other two ”

“ EPISTLE TO BOSCÁN.
Who loves like me for his friend's eye to frame
Thoughts even on things that have no Spanish name,
Can never want materials for his sheet,
Clothed in a style brief, simple, easy, neat,
And chaste in ornament, as best befits
The chitchat writing of familiar wits.
Amidst the' advantage which with other things
To minds like ours perfected friendship brings,
Is this same careless freedom which one gains
From the nice pomp of ceremonial chains. ”

“ I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure: I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and, heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing, they create only weariness.
The same incorrectness and bad taste that mark his style, composed of words and phrases noble and sublime, united with others as mean and trivial, are found in his images and thoughts, which are mixed together without economy, judgment, or decorum. ”

“ Which late it had, to candidly avow,
And thus conclude its sorrows; so that now
It neither does become thy truth to seek
For farther knowledge, nor myself to speak,—
Myself, whom fortune has alone distressed,
And who alone in dying look for rest.
SALICIO.
Who is so barbarous to himself as e'er
To' entrust his person to a murderer's care,
His treasures to the spoiler! Can it be,
That without discomposure thou canst see
Love make in frolic, for a flight of skill,
Thy very tongue the puppet of his will?
[Pg 210]
ALBANIO.
Salicio, cease this language ”

“ His genius, more delicate and tender than strong and sublime, inclined him by preference to the sweet images of the country, and to the native sentiments of the eclogue and elegy. He had a vivid and pleasing fancy, a mode of thought noble and decorous, an exquisite sensibility; and this happy natural disposition, assisted by the study of the ancients, and intercourse with the Italians, produced those compositions which, though so few, conciliated for him instantly an estimation and a respect, which succeeding ages have not ceased to confirm. ”

“ His versification, simple, clear, and flowing, has a purity, music, and dignity of numbers, that ever and anon seems to bring upon the ear the mellifluous majesty of Virgil: he tempers the gravity of his style with such a continuous sweetness as to form in their union a harmony equally proportioned. The pause of his verses is always full of beauty, the closing melody of the sentence gratifying the reader as he rests. With all his delicacy of expression and artful sweetness, he has remarkable pliancy and ease ”

“ It is true that we often meet with an ingenious thought, an apposite image, and a stanza well constructed; but it is equally true, that we stumble, at the same instant, upon ideas puerile, mean, and trivial, upon uncouth verses, and indeterminate rhymes. The writer is seen to struggle with the rudeness of the language, as well as with the heaviness of the versification, and, in spite of all the efforts he makes, entirely overcome by the difficulty, he neither strikes out true expression nor elegant harmony. They knew, and they handled Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and other ancient poets ”

“ The hexameter demands a prosody more determinate and fixed than the Spanish language possesses, to satisfy the ear; and therefore the imitation of it is so much the more difficult, not to say impossible. He would, doubtless, however, have enriched the art by establishing this novelty, had it not been necessary, for this purpose, that the art were then in its infancy, in order that the docile and flexible language might accommodate itself to the will of the poet, and had he been the colossal genius that could subjugate others, and dictate to them a law of like versification. ”

“ Very few of the good poets of Spain published their works in their lifetime. The works of Garcilasso, Luis de Leon, Francisco de la Torre, Herrera, the Argensólas, Quevedo, and others, were published after their death by their heirs or friends, with more or less judgment. How much would they not have rejected, if they had published their writings in their own name! how many corrections would they not have made in the selection, and how many spots of slovenliness, bad taste, and obscurity, would they not have expunged! ”

“ But the composition in which this rich poetic diction shines equally with his ardent and vigorous imagination, is the elevated Ode, which Herrera, a happy imitator of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin poetry, knew how to fill with his fire, and thus to become the rival of the ancients. Lyric poetry, in its origin, was very distant from the range of ordinary ideas. The poet, possessed by an afflatus which it was not in his power either to moderate or to rule, chanted his verses before the altars of the temples, in the public theatres, at the head of armies, in grand national solemnities. ”

“ Of Spanish comedies, it is notorious that the defects exceed the beauties. Happier in shorter kinds of composition, her odes, elegies, sonnets, romances, and letrillas, approach nearer to perfection. But even in these, what forgetfulness of propriety, what negligence at times, and at times what pedantry and false taste exist! In the best writers, in the choicest pieces, the mind is offended by finding too frequently joined to a fine turn a harsh extravagance, and a sharp thorn to an incomparable flower. ”

“ Poetry, which is a recreation and amusement for those who enjoy it, should be a very serious and almost exclusive occupation with those who profess it, if they aspire to hold any distinguished rank in reputation. When it is considered that Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Tasso, Ariosto, Pope, Racine, and others, were at once the greatest poets and the most laborious, it should not be thought extraordinary that those have remained so far behind, who, even supposing them to have possessed equal talent, equalled them neither in application nor perseverance. ”

“ Consigned to poems, to tragedies, to comedies, to popular songs, his memory, like that of Achilles, has had the fortune to strike forcibly and occupy the fancy; but the Castilian hero, superior without doubt to the Greek in strength and in virtue, has not had the advantage of meeting with a Homer.
It was not possible to meet with one at the period when the rude writer of that poem sat down to compose it. With a language altogether uncouth, harsh in its terminations, vicious in its construction, naked of all culture and harmony ”