To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the volume _Les précurseurs_, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918, entitled _Empédocle d'Agrigente et l'âge de la haine_. The great sage of classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible. Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the infinite. 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.