I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

"I Mary MacLane, A Diary of Human Days", is a humanly revealing chapter of a life, which had more vividly expressed itself in "The Story of Mary MacLane" some twelve years earlier, which lived itself out in changing fashion at various epochs of childhood and young womanhood and has come back to a retrospect of itself, sincere and frank and unafraid. It even dares to display a self-absorbed egoism far beyond the limits which the false conventionalites regard as permissible. There are flaws to be picked in Mary MacLane and weaknesses to be found in the manner of the telling of this story of hers. Indeed, she might say that is just what she sets out to reveal as she writes. There are many indications of her insufficiencies in realizing her own life and turning it to such account that many of her perplexities would solve themselves because they would be resolved into a centering purpose. There would then be left no room for many of the difficulties, much of the loneliness of unfilled days.

Life has cast her at this time into the "outward role of a family daughter with no responsibilities," and in this inactivity and insincerity of family circle conversations, marked by reserve with which constant companions securely hide their true selves from one another, she has undertaken this task of writing to help her to keep herself sweet and sane. In the intimacy of her writing alone at her desk she gives free play to the multiplicity of elements which make up the real self, the intensely human self, which proves itself by its distractions and intricacies of manifestation, its seeming contradictions, its libertine longings, to which no outward convention so readily sets the barrier as does the real yearning impulse deeper and truer than these. Such longings are only partial and tentative, merely would-be excursions of the effort of the deeper, surer impulse, which both impels and restrains them. By these it proclaims itself of the unconscious soul of man, which has built itself out of uncountable ages of actual essay of these partial impulses, these "polymorphous" trends, through which the unity of the psyche has been trying to find and establish itself. They have become unconscious because one by one as the race progressed, or as the child, repeating the history of the race, made its way into the culture established about it, these partial instincts found themselves either left behind as no longer serviceable in the growth of culture and the building up of society, or became resolved by a sublimation into some higher and more complete form of self and racial expression and power. This they had preceded and for this they had been a partial preparation.