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.