approached by various
writers. There is, first, the purely sentimental: Prevost's Manon Les
caut. Then there is the slobberingly sentimental: Dumas' Dame aux
Camelias. A third is the necrophilically romantic: Louys' Aphrodite.
The fertile Balzac has given us no less than two: the purely romantic,
in his fascinating portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically
realistic, in his Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Reade's Peg
Woffington may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama;
Defoe's Moll Flanders is honestly realistic; Zola's Nana is rabidly so.

There is one singular fact that must be noted in connection with the
vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette or
drab--put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold ye! such
is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the resultant
portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at the very least,
has all the enigmatic piquancy of a Monna Lisa... Not a slut, but what
is a hetaera; and not a hetaera, but what is well-nigh Kypris herself!
I know of but one depiction in all literature that possesses the
splendour of implacable veracity as well as undiminished artistry;
where the portrait is that of a prostitute, despite all her tirings and
trappings; a depiction truly deserving to be designated a portrait: the
portrait supreme of the harlot eternal--Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

Furthermore, it will be observed that such depictions, for the most
part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not pictures of
prostitution. It is also a singular fact that war, another scourge has
met with similar treatment. We have the pretty, spotless grenadiers and
cuirassiers of Meissonier in plenty; Vereshchagin is still alone in the
grim starkness of his wind-swept, snow-covered battle-fields, with
black crows wheeling over the crumpled masses of gray...

And, curiously enough, it is another great Russian, Kuprin, who is
supreme--if not unique--as a painter of the universal scourge of
prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for
portraits. True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange allure,
aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity--even
though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the
miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of life. But, even if he may be
said to have used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his
colours for the portraits, his portraits are