Well, there is no way of proving it or disproving it. Stendhal was given to mystifications, and this little blasphemy may have been one of them. If so, it would have been a shaft of mockery aimed at the century with the following message attached: if Christ were reborn in our debased and hypocritical time, He would come, as befits the age, in the shape of the upstart Sorel, and you would send Him to the guillotine, monsieur....
The Red and the Black is not the only novel that illustrates the evil effects of reading. There is quite a string of them, going back to Don Quixote, whose hero’s initial error sprang from reading chivalrous romances. These tales of chivalry unhinged him, so that he mistook the age he was living in, took prosaic windmills for castles, a peasant wench for a lady, and a broken-down jade for a charger. An idea had been implanted in him that rough reality, however often encountered, was powerless to correct. That Don Quixote, though mad, is a hero he owes to the fact that, like Julien Sorel, he remains true to his fixed idea. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey is in a similar case except that the Gothic romances she has stuffed herself with have made her fearful rather than brave; in an everyday world with its own perils, she is a prey to Gothic terror. She is the weakest, in both senses, of Jane Austen’s heroines, perhaps because her mistakes do not originate in her distinct self, as Emma’s do or even Anne’s (Anne is persuadable by nature), but are traceable to outside influences—bad literature—like a common cold she has caught.
In Nightmare Abbey Peacock’s characters have been completely vitiated by reading—Werther, Kant, Dante’s Purgatorio, Burke on the Sublime (“A conspiracy against cheerfulness”), stronger stuff than Catherine Morland was exposed to, and the effect is more lasting. In Meredith’s The Egoist—Meredith for a time was Peacock’s son-in-law—Sir Willoughby Patterne’s dreadful habit of discoursing with himself inside his head is said to be the result of reading “imaginative compositions of his time,” i.e., popular romances. And on the other hand there is the wise youth Adrian of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, who “had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace,” but the consequences for his moral fiber, which is prematurely wizened and shrunken, seem to be even more deplorable. This “epicurean,” who is always quoting a cynical poet called “Sandoe”—an author of Meredith’s own invention—is a curious yet fitting associate for poor Sir Austin Feverel in his System for educating young Richard.
Emma Bovary’s ruin can be seen to have its origin in the books she read in the convent and on her father’s farm—books that “put ideas” in her head. The incriminated texts were not just cheap romances; she read Chateaubriand and George Sand, as well as Eugène Sue. Monsieur Homais, too, was a reader. We are not given his book list, but an article he has read in some journal is the source of his addled, sinister project to have Charles Bovary operate on Hippolyte’s clubfoot. The only benign and harmless people in that novel are Charles, who cannot stay awake over a book, and non-readers like the illiterate servant-girl Félicité.
D. H. Lawrence comes to mind again, though I do not remember any citations of specifically harmful reading matter mentioned by him. But I can supply, finally, a quite recent example from a living author. Solzhenitsyn in August 1914 lays the disastrous defeat on the Eastern Front that culminated in the battle of Tannenberg in part if not wholly at the door of the Russian generals who had read War and Peace. These high-placed fools, he tells us, were seeking to imitate the strategy of Kutuzov as described in the novel—a strategy, or tactic, of delay and evasion that was totally out of place in the circumstances of the Masurian Lakes campaign of the First World War and in any case, according to Solzhenitsyn, had been “romanced” by Tolstoy with no support from historical fact. The quite unnecessary (as he sees it) collapse at Tannenberg, ending in the suicide of General Samsonov, demoralized the Czarist Army and thus paved the way for the general debacle of 1917, which led to the Bolshevik seizure of power. Hence the popularity of War and Peace was a large contributing factor in the creation of the Soviet state.