20–11590
“In ‘Liluli’ Romain Rolland has given to the world one of the most daring satires that have ever been written. Liluli is illusion, the ideal, the chimera, the eternal vamp of history. The time and place of the drama are fanciful. The stage is a ravine spanned by a footbridge. The human race is on the march—toward a mirage. There are peasants and intellectuals, diplomatists and socialists, satyrs and mountebanks, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, Truth and Opinion, the Gallipoulets and the Hurluberloches (who are at war), shopkeepers, peddlers and fettered brains. And Polichinello. He is the laughing brain. He is the eternal mocker. He believes in nothing and smiles at all things. He is the wisdom of folly. In the general crash on the bridge of the world, when the human race goes into the abyss, Polichinello goes with it. Everything collapses on him—the fighting people, furniture, crockery, poultry, stones, earth and the grand chorus of idealists. On top of the mess sits Liluli, her legs crossed, smiling and showing the tip of her tongue, her fore-finger to her nose.”—N Y Times
Booklist 17:22 O ’20
“The play is a farce and a savage satire all in one. It is Aristophanic in its conception and working out, now bitter, now blatant, now indecent, and at times blasphemous. It would have been entirely possible to satirize hypocrisy and venality as playing potent parts in the stirring up of war without insulting religion and its God.”
− Cath World 112:408 D ’20 170w
“It is a strange and powerful book, this monstrous comedy of world-wide calamity. The logical necessity of the catastrophe, the inevitableness with which not only the vices, but even the virtues of her victims play into the hands of Liluli, make them susceptible to her lure, and hasten their doom, gives this weird farce the impressiveness of a Greek tragedy.” H. M. Evers
+ Grinnell R 15:258 O ’20 620w
“It is a pity that M. Rolland has chosen the now dominant symbolical forms for the embodiment of his fable. Never so much as today did art need to speak directly. ‘Liluli’ is beautiful and memorable. But its literary sophistication stands in the way of its broader effectiveness.” Ludwig Lewisohn
+ − Nation 111:18 Jl 3 ’20 370w