which I then experienced, of expelling a lower depth of ignoble instincts, seems to me characteristic and humiliating.  I may add that even in the midst of these dissipations I retained a certain reserve.  The contacts to which I exposed myself failed to soil me; nothing was left when I had crossed the threshold.  I have always retained, from that forcible and indifferent commerce, the habit of attributing no consequence to the action of the flesh.  The amorous function, which religion and morality have surrounded with mystery or seasoned with sin, seems to me a function like any other, a little vile, but agreeable, and one to which the usual epilogue is too long....  This kind of companionship only lasted for a short time.”  This analysis of the attitude of a certain common type of civilized modern man seems to be just, but it may perhaps occur to some readers that a commerce which led to “the action of the flesh” being regarded as of no consequence can scarcely be said to have left no taint.

In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Regnier, in his novel, Les Rencontres de Monsieur Breot (p. 50), represents Bercaille as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are robust and agreeable, they possess the naivete which is always charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be repelled by those little accidents which might offend the fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.

Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of prostitution (Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, pp. 359-362), refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J.P.  Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of what he felt to be lower instincts; in his Niels Lyhne he describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy.  “At such moments,” Bloch remarks, “the man is another being.  The ‘two souls’ in the breast become a reality.  Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist, the fine-souled aesthetician, the artist who has given us so many splendid and pure works in poetry and painting?  We no longer recognize him, for at such moments another being has come to the surface, another nature is moving within him, and with the power of an elementary force is impelling him towards things at which his ‘upper consciousness,’ the civilized man within him, would shudder.”  Bloch believes that we are here concerned with a kind of normal masculine masochism, which prostitution serves to gratify.

IV.  The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution.