The author of “Phra” has claimed for Romance the ancient license accorded to Poetry and to Painting—
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas.
He has supposed a young Phœnician merchant, full of the love of adventure, and endowed with a large and observant if very mystic philosophy—such as would serve for no bad standpoint whence to witness the rise and fall of religions and peoples. The Adventurer sets out for the “tin islands,” or Cassiterides, at a date before the Roman conquest of England. He dies and lives anew many times, but preserves his personal identity under the garb of half a dozen transmigrations. And yet, while renewing in each existence the characteristic passions and sentiments which constitute his individuality and preserve the unity of the narrative, the author seems to me to have adapted him to varying times and places with a vraisemblance and absence of effort which are extremely effective.
A Briton in British days, the slave-consort of his Druid wife, he passes, by daring but convenient inventiveness, into the person of a Centurion in the household of a noble Roman lady who illustrates in her surroundings the luxurious vices of the latter empire with some relics still of the older Republican virtues. Hence he glides again into oblivion, yet wakes from the mystical slumber in time to take part in King Harold’s gallant but fatal stand against the Normans.
He enjoys the repose, as a Saxon thane, which the policy of the Conqueror granted to the vanquished; but after some startling adventures in the vast oak woods of the South kingdom is rudely ousted from his homestead by the “foreigners,” and in a neighboring monastery sinks into secular forgetfulness once more of wife and children, lands and life.
On the return of consciousness he finds himself enshrined as a saint, thanks to the strange physical phenomena of his suspended animation, and learns from the Abbot that he has lain there in the odor of sanctity, according to indisputable church records, during 300 years.
He wanders off again, finding everything new and strange, and becomes an English knight under King Edward III. He is followed to Crecy by a damsel, who, from act to act of his long life-drama, similarly renews an existence linked with his own, and who constantly seeks his love. She wears the armor of a brother knight, and on the field of battle she sacrifices her life for his.
Yet once more, a long spell of sleep, which is not death, brings this much-wandering Phra to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and it is there, after many and strange vicissitudes, he writes his experiences, and the curtain finally falls over the last passage of this remarkable record.
Such, briefly, is the framework of the creation which, while it has certainly proved to me extremely seductive as a story, is full, I think, of philosophical suggestiveness. As long as men count mournfully the years of that human life which M. Renan has declared to be so ridiculously short, so long their fancies will hover about the possibility of an elixir vitæ, of splendidly extended spans like those ascribed to the old patriarchs, and meditate with fascination the mystical doctrines of Buddhism and the Vedantes. In such a spirit the Egyptians wrapped their dead in careful fashion, after filling the body with preservatives; and if ancient tomes have the “Seven Sleepers” of the Koran, the Danish King who dozes under the Castle of Elsinore, and our own undying King Arthur, do we not go to see “Rip Van Winkle” at the play, and is not hibernation one among the problems of modern science which whispers that we might, if we liked, indefinitely adjourn the waste of corporeal tissue, and spread our seventy or eighty years over ever so many centuries?