But do you know, I don't think the English or American people are exactly calculated to reward the sort of vivisection you mean.

The _bete_ is too conscious of his moral fibre when he's respectable, and when he isn't respectable he doesn't commit picturesque crimes, he steals and boozes.
I dare say he's bestial enough, but pure unrelieved filth can't be transmuted into literature, and as a people we're perfectly devoid of that extraordinary artistic nature that it makes such a foil for in the Latins.

That is really the only excuse the naturalists have." "Excuse!" Elfrida repeated, with a bewildered look.

"You had Wainwright," she added hastily.
"_Nous nous en felicitons!_ We've got him still--in Madame Tussaud's," cried Janet "He poisoned for money in cold blood--not exactly an artistic vice! Oh, _he_ won't do!"-- she laughed triumphantly--"if he did write charming things about the Renaissance! Besides, he illustrates my case; among us he was a phenomenon, like the elephant-headed man.

Phenomena are for the scientists.