The Story of Mary MacLane/March 21
SOME people think, absurdly enough, that to be Scotch or descended from the Scottish clans is to be rather strong, rather conservative, firm in faith, and all that. The idea is one that should be completely exploded by this time. I think that the Scotch as a nation are the most difficult of all to characterize. Their traits and tendencies cover a wider field than those of any other. To be Scotch is to be anything. There is no man so narrow as a Scotchman. There is no man so broad as a Scotchman. There is no mind so versatile as a Scotch mind. At the same time only a Scotch mind is capable of clinging with bull-dog tenacity to one idea. A Scotch heart out of all, and through all, can be true as death. A Scotch heart—the same one—can be cunning and treacherous as false human hearts are made. To be English is to have limits; the Germans, the French, the Russians—they have all some inevitable attributes to modify their genius.
But one may be anything—anything, if one is Scotch.
Always I think of the cruel, hardened, ferocious, weather-beaten, kilted Clan MacLean wandering over bleak winter hills, fighting the powerful MacDonalds and MacGregors—and generally wiping them from the earth,—marching away with merrily shrieking pipes from fields of withered, blood-soaked heather—and all this merely to gather intensified life for me. I feel that the causes of my tragedy began long, long ago from remote germs.
My Scotch blood added to my genius sense has made me into a dangerous chemical compound. By analyzing I have brought an almost clear portrait of myself up before my mind's eyes.
When I was a child I did not analyze knowingly, but the child was this same genius, though I am one of the kind that changes widely and decidedly in the years. This weary unhappiness is not a matter of development.
When I was a child I felt dumbly what I feel now less dumbly. At the age of five I used sometimes to weep silently in the night—I did not know why. It was that I felt my aloneness, my foreignness to all things. I felt the heavy, heavy weight of life—and I was only five.
I was only five, and it seems a thousand years ago. But sometimes back through the long, winding, unused passages of my mind I hear that silent sobbing of the child and the unarmed wailing of a tiny, tired soul.
It mingles with the bitter Nothingness of the grown young woman, and oh, with it all—with it all I am so unhappy!
There is something subtly Scotch in all this.
But Scotch or Indian or Japanese, there is no stopping of the pain.