Although Woods Hutchinson quotes with approval the declaration of a friend, “Out of thousands I have never seen one with good table manners,” there is still a real sense in which the prostitute represents, however inadequately, the attraction of civilization.  “There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady’s face and hear a lady’s voice,” wrote the novelist Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography, concerning his early life in London.  “No allurement to decent respectability came in my way.  It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man.  The temptation at any rate prevailed with me.”  In every great city, it has been said, there are thousands of men who have no right to call any woman but a barmaid by her Christian name.[210] All the brilliant fever of civilization pulses round them in the streets but their lips never touch it.  It is the prostitute who incarnates this fascination of the city, far better than the virginal woman, even if intimacy with her were within reach.  The prostitute represents it because she herself feels it, because she has even sacrificed her woman’s honor in the effort to identify herself with it.  She has unbridled feminine instincts, she is a mistress of the feminine arts of adornment, she can speak to him concerning the mysteries of womanhood and the luxuries of sex with an immediate freedom and knowledge the innocent maiden cloistered in her home would be incapable of.  She appeals to him by no means only because she can gratify the lower desires of sex, but also because she is, in her way, an artist, an expert in the art of feminine exploitation, a leader of feminine fashions.  For she is this, and there are, as Simmel has stated in his Philosophie der Mode, good psychological reasons why she always should be this.  Her uncertain social position makes all that is conventional and established hateful to her, while her temperament makes perpetual novelty delightful.  In new fashions she finds “an aesthetic form of that instinct of destruction which seems peculiar to all pariah existences, in so far as they are not completely enslaved in spirit.”

“However surprising it may seem to some,” a modern writer remarks, “prostitutes must be put on the same level as artists.  Both use their gifts and talents for the joy and pleasure of others, and, as a rule, for payment.  What is the essential difference between a singer who gives pleasure to hearers by her throat and a prostitute who gives pleasure to those who seek her by another part of her body?  All art works on the senses.”  He refers to the significant fact that actors, and especially actresses, were formerly regarded much as prostitutes are now (R.  Hellmann, Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, pp. 245-252).

Bernaldo de Quiros and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 242) trace