Chapter XIX: Liluli

During these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European, had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb. To many it may seem strange that Rolland's first imaginative work to be written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should have been a farcical comedy, _Liluli_. Yet this lightness of mood sprang from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world, turned to irony as a means of abreaction--to employ a term introduced by the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.

_Liluli_ is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy, or rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of 1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"), wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable, there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe. France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy, the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and finally mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void. Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the roar of laughter which will set me free?"

In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new work maintains the rhythm of _Colas Breugnon_, with its vibrant rhymes, and although in _Liluli_ as in _Colas Breugnon_ there is a strain of raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart overfull. In _Colas Breugnon_ we find the geniality, the joviality, of a broad laugh; in _Liluli_ the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world are heaped between the old France of _Colas Breugnon_ and the new France of _Liluli_. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter irony.