“But when,” he writes, “he had served God truly for eleven days, it often happened that other powers gained the upper hand in him; by an overwhelming force he was driven to the coarse lust of coarse enjoyments; he yielded, overcome by the human passion for self-annihilation, which, while the blood burns as blood only can burn, demands degradation, perversity, dirt, and foulness, with no less force than the force which inspires the equally human passion for becoming greater than one is, and purer.”
These human instincts can be satisfied only by prostitution. By the purchasable prostitute this desire, described so aptly and with so much insight by Jakobsen, can be fully satisfied. To the origin of the desire we shall return in another connexion. The common, the rough, the brutal animal in the nature of prostitution, exercises a formal magical attractive force on large numbers of men.
Ludwig Pietsch, in his “Recollections of Sixty Years,” vol. ii., p. 337 (Berlin, 1894), tells of the celebrated cocotte of the Second French Empire, Cora Pearl, whom he saw in Baden-Baden:
“I have never been able to understand how it was that she exercised so powerful an attraction. In her appearance, her tumid, painted ‘pug-face,’ the secret was certainly not to be found. Perhaps the influence which she exercised on so many men rested principally in the quality which the royal friend of the Danish Countess Danner described to the latter, when explaining to her the reason of the power, to others quite incomprehensible, which Cora Pearl had exercised on his own heart. He said: ‘She is so gloriously vulgar.’”
This word speaks volumes, and illuminates the peculiar influence of prostitutes and prostitution upon man in an apt and powerful way.[285]
Admirably, also, has Stefan Grimmen, in his novelette “Die Landpartie” (published in Die Welt am Montag, No. 22, May 28, 1906), described this influence, which in this case was exercised by two demi-mondaines lying in the grass, upon the masculine members of a picnic-party, who were so enthralled as completely to forget the ladies of their company. The de Goncourts were also aware of the specific allurement exercised by prostitutes, for in one place in their diary they recommend a wife to adopt certain customs of prostitutes, in order to bind her husband to her for a long time.
In this respect, we cannot fail to recognize a certain masochistic trait in the sensibility of men, which appears especially remarkable when we call to mind the contrast between the nature of the above described spiritually lofty persons and the nature of a prostitute. In this way we should be led to the view that prostitution is in part a product of the physiological male masochism—that is to say, of the impulse from time to time to plunge into the depths of coarse, brutal, sexual lust and of self-mortification and self-abasement, by surrender to a comparatively worthless creature. This attraction towards prostitutes is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the psyche of the modern civilized man; it is the curse of the evolution of civilization.
“The most ideal man also is unable to free himself from his body,” says Heinrich Schurtz; “refinement leads ultimately to an unnatural over-nicety, which must necessarily be permeated from time to time by a breath of fresh unrefinement and coarse naturalism, if it is not to perish from its own inward contradiction.”
In a certain sense the same need finds expression also in Gutzkow’s remark in the “Neue Serapionsbrüder,” vol. i., p. 198 (Breslau, 1877), that man sometimes has a need for “woman-in-herself,” not woman with the thousand and one tricks and whimsies of wives, mothers, and daughters.
Without question, this need is much more characteristic of man than of woman. Still, I am not prepared altogether to deny its existence in the latter. In another connexion I shall return to this extremely important question.