It is not all certain that the poet was very young when he feigned his dream. The hero of the poem is necessarily a young man. Early manhood is the period of vehement desire and passion. Twenty is the typical age of early manhood; that age may have very well been selected as the one best fitted for dreams of love and the adventures of a lover. We are, however, inclined to believe, on the whole, that the poem was written in quite early manhood. A tradition which only recalls one fact is generally true, and the one fact recorded of the poet is that he died quite young. Internal evidence, too, appears to support this view. His style bears marks which seem, though one may here be very easily mistaken, those of inexperience. His imaginative faculty is abundant, and even luxuriant. His descriptive power, fully employed in his portraits of abstract personifications, is very much above the average. He revels in picturesque accessories and details which his copious fancy has conjured up; and his pictures, if they have not always the tone, have all the vividness, with the wealth of work, which belongs to a young poet's early style. The versification, moreover, is cold, regular, and monotonous; there is nothing to indicate the possession of experience or the presence of passion. He had read Ovid, and used him freely to suit his own purposes; but he wants Ovid's sympathetic power, and tries to supply its place by a certain cold and mannered grace; his faults being attributable, in the assumption of his early death, more to inexperience and youth, than to any defects which years would not have removed. Considered in this light, his work remains an unfinished monument of early genius, chiefly redeemed from mediocrity by its collections of curiously constructed allegorical portraits, a work which would never have been rescued from oblivion but for the splendour of light thrown on it by Jean de Meung.
Chaucer's translation is exceedingly accurate, giving line for line, and almost word for word, save when he sometimes adds a line to enforce its meaning, or to make it clear. Thus, when translating the famous
'La robe ne faict pas la moyne,'
he says—
'Habite ne makyth monk no frere;
But clene life and devocioun,
Makyth gode men of religioun.'
The saying itself (for nothing in the 'Romance of the Rose' appears to be original), may be traced to Neckham, who died at Cirencester in 1217.
'Non tonsura facit monachum, nec horrida vestis,
Sed virtus animi, perpetuusque vigor.'