This is said, not as a plea in favor of John Webster, but as an analysis of some of the tortuous and yet well-meaning paths which Anderson’s mind likes to travel. At any rate, he made no mystery of his intentions or of the significance of his book. He tells us that, whilst loving Natalie Schwartz, his mistress, John Webster never intended to shut himself off from the possibility of loving another woman, or many other women. Why should not a rich man marry many times? He was certain that all the potentialities in wedlock had yet been hardly explored. He wanted to be the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of inter-human relations. In Webster’s mind something had opposed itself, up to then, to a broad and human acceptation of life. Before loving one had to know and accept himself and others. Sexual love is true only when it comes as an inspiration, a miracle. Happy are those who follow the call. But they are few. For most people life is a renunciation of their best self. And that is why John Webster left his wife. She had never forgiven him his primitive spontaneity and his brusque mode of attack at their first meeting. “Leave all and follow me,” says the Voice. Love must not be a bond but a token of freedom. Such was the meaning of the refrain heard by John Webster one day. Let us break down the walls and free the prisoners: If one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life. Then each one of us could become “something more than just one individual man and woman living one narrow circumscribed life.” One could tear down all walls and fences and walk in and out many people. One might in oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.