420
PARTISAN REVIEW
A pretty fable, is it not? And one which implies no
"moral", since the teeth of the two children are of
equal
white–
ness! The bars separating the two worlds are only
symbolic,
as are the toys and the children. Hugo would have drawn an
effective indictment against the children of the rich from this
story, he would have demanded that society at once procure
real toys for pariah urchins, he might even have undertaken a
campaign for the extermination of rats in the countryside!
But Baudelaire is still completely
dazed
by this vision; by an
understandable impulse he identifies himself with the rich and
rosy child-perhaps he believes himself to be this child-he
drops his artificial top-and with
fascination
observes the
strange new toy-the
living rat.
How often, throughout his life,
his critical mind must have looked-with the same fascination–
at the poems created by the other Baudelaire--the poet, the
dreamer, the pariah urchin! How
terrible
is his toy! how dirty
the child! Yet an
"unbiased eye would discover his beauty."
But does it exist, this unbiased eye, which would see beauty–
and not just filth-in this strange toy, which-out of thrift?
out of wisdom?-the Abyss from time to time hands out to
certain children of men-the
living rat?
(Translated /rom the French
by
Lionel Abel)
