This may be a generous dream, and one infinitely more attractive than the inhibitions of Winesburg or Gopher Prairie, and yet one cannot help seeing in John Webster’s gospel only the last challenge of romanticism at bay. After Rousseau, Walt Whitman has tried the gospel of sexual sincerity at all cost. He had attempted to call the universe to him and hold it in his naked arms. “I Walt Whitman, a cosmos!” and it all ended in failure. Theodore Dreiser in “The Genius” had answered John Webster’s queries concerning sexual freedom. Sherwood Anderson himself noted somewhere that humanism and not pantheism, concentration and not expansion, could free and feed human hearts. Webster’s mystic orgies have not only ethics but common sense against them. But Anderson is a poet. Like Whitman he worships Life and the Vital Force. He wants us to surrender to all beautiful instincts. Society denies us this right, Life itself will build a bridge to greater freedom. Life, he proclaims, will empty the prisons. It will raise the lid of the “well” where the Freudian monsters are asleep, these monsters which the Puritan felt groping within himself, and which he carefully and wisely held in chains. Anderson wants to free the Hairy Ape and make an angel of him: There was a deep well within every man and woman, and when Life came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come in.[48]