Summing up Balzac's entire literary production, which in Monsieur de Lovenjoul's catalogue occupies no fewer than fourteen pages, we find that it comprises, besides the ninety-six different works of the _Comedie Humaine_ properly so called, ten volumes of his early novels; six complete dramatic pieces--one, the _School for Husbands and Wives_ recently published;[*] thirty _Contes Drolatiques_; and three hundred and fourteen articles and opuscles, some of them fairly long, since the _Reminiscences of a Pariah_ has a hundred and eighty-four pages octavo, the _Theory of Walking_ fifty, the _Code of Honest People_ a hundred and twelve, the _Impartial History of the Jesuits_ eighty; these exclusive of the _Revue Parisienne_ with its two hundred and twenty pages, which, as we have seen, was written entirely by himself. When we remember that the whole of this, with the exception of the early novels and six of the opuscles, was produced in twenty years, we can better appreciate the man's industry, which, as Monsieur Le Breton calculates, yielded an average of some two thousand pages, or four to five volumes a year. [*] Played for the first time March 13, 1910, at the Odeon Theatre. In the miscellanies one meets with much that is curious, amusing, 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.