George Eliot’s “Moral Swindlers” and the Case of Baudelaire

Abstract

George Eliot characterizes Charles Baudelaire as a fop incapable of moral reflection. In her comments on other morally questionable artists, she vacillates between condemning their faulty principles and conduct, and praising their capacity for human sympathy. But she condemns Baudelaire absolutely, in language evoking poison, filth, and the devil. Eliot’s didactic intention, her wish to preserve the innocence of “young minds,” and her belief in the redemptive power of human sympathy are alien to Baudelaire; but her failure to see the moral seriousness of his work evidently stems from an incomplete acquaintance with it. She does not seem to have read more of his poetry than the lines quoted by Algernon Swinburne in his provocative review of Les Fleurs du mal, which emphasizes Baudelaire’s cruelty and fascination with evil.