guet, there are no "general ideas" in Balzac.[155] One
can only reply, "Heavens! Why should there be?" The celebrated unreason
of "going to a gin-palace for a leg of mutton" (already quoted, and
perhaps to be quoted again) is sound and sensible as compared with
asking general ideas from a novelist. They are not quite absolutely
forbidden to him, though he will have to be very careful lest they get
in his way. But they are most emphatically not his business, except as
very rare and very doubtful means to a quite different end, means
absolutely insufficient by themselves and exceedingly difficult to
combine with the other means which--more or fewer of them--are not only
sufficient but necessary. The "slice of human life," not necessarily,
but preferably ordinary, presenting probable and interesting
characters, connected by sufficient plot, diversified and adorned by
descriptive and other devices, and abundantly furnished with the
conversation of men and women of this world, the whole forming such a
whole as will amuse, thrill, affect, and in other ways, to use the
all-important word once more, _interest_ the reader,--that is what is
wanted. And this definition is as rigid at least as the Aristotelian
definition of tragedy and perhaps more exhaustive, as concerns the
novel, including, with the necessary modifications, the romance--and the
romance, including, with the necessary modifications, the novel. In it
"general ideas," unless a very special and not at all usual meaning is
attached to the term, can have no right of place. They may be brought
in, as almost anything may be brought in if the writer is Samson enough
to bring it. But they cannot be demanded of him as facts, images,
emotions, style, and a very large number of other things can or may be,
not, of course, all at once, but in larger or smaller selection. General
ideas may and perhaps should be demanded from the philosopher, the
historian, the political student. From the poet and the novelist they
cannot be. And that they should be so demanded is one of the chief
instances of what seems to the present writer to be the greatest mistake
of French novel, as of other, criticism--its persistent relapse upon the
rule-system and its refusal to judge by the result.[156]

It is all the more unreasonable to demand general _ideas_ from Balzac
himself, because he is so liberal of general _imagery_, and what is
more, general _prosopopoeia_. Be the Balzacian world real, as som