ing, and
instructive, quite worthy to figure in the _Comedy_--witty dialogues,
light stories containing deductions _a la_ Sherlock Holmes or Edgar
Allan Poe, plenty of satire, sometimes acidulated as in his _Troubles
and Trials of an English Cat_, and theories about everything,
indicative of extensive reading, large assimilation and quick
reasoning. The miscellanies really stand to the novels in the relation
of a sort of prolegomenon. They serve for its better understanding,
and are agreeable even for independent study.

CHAPTER XV

VALUE OF THE WORK

The aim of an author whose writings are intended to please must be
ethical as well as aesthetic, if he respects himself and his readers.
He wishes the pleasure he can give to do good, not harm. The good he
feels capable of producing may be limited to the physical or may
extend beyond to the moral; but it will be found in his work in so far
as the latter is truly artistic.

Balzac's prefaces and correspondence are so many proofs that he
rejected the pretensions of literature or any other art to absolute
independence. The doctrine of art for art's sake alone would have had
no meaning to him. However much his striving to confer on his novels
organic unity, and however much the writing against time deteriorated
his practice, they did not prevent him from recognizing the ethical
claim. What he realized less was the necessity of submitting treatment
to the same government of law.

Even if we grant that the plan of the _Comedie Humaine_ existed in the
novelist's mind from the commencement, obscurely at first, more
clearly afterwards, the plan itself was not artistic in the sense that
an image in the architect's mind is artistic when he designs on paper
the edifice he purposes to construct, or in the painter's mind when he
chooses the subject and details of his picture, or in the sculptor's
mind when he arranges his group of statuary, or in the musician's mind
when he conjures up his opera or oratorio. Balzac's plan was one of
numbers or logic merely. The block of his _Comedy_ was composed on the
dictionary principle of leaving nothing out which could be put in; and
his genius, great as it was, wrestled achingly and in vain with a task
from which selection was practically banished and which was a piling
of Pelion on Ossa.

For this reason it is that, regarded as an aggregate, the _Comedie
Humaine_ can be admired onl