“It was with the same eagerness to learn and get help and light wherever it could be found that Miss Buss welcomed the institution of the University Examinations for schools and scholars. Her gratitude to the University of Cambridge for having been the first to come to the help of the girls was very beautiful and touching. It would have had to be a very good reason indeed that would make her substitute Oxford for Cambridge, and the loyalty of her affectionate preference for Girton over all other colleges was tender and very deep. She loved Cambridge as if it had been her own Alma Mater. It was the Alma Mater of so many of her girls in the early struggling days.
“I spoke of energy of will as one of her striking qualities, and her whole life illustrates this so well that it only remains to indicate its influence on the inner life of the school. She was not always quick to decide unless it was necessary, and then she decided instantly. Otherwise she deliberated before decision with great care, weighing all sides of the matter, as she would say. But once decided, she acted at once, and kept on acting till the thing was done. That was where she economized force, and in it lay the secret of much of her power and her tradition. Her own mind did not admit of pause between decision and act, and probably there was no quality in other people which tried her patience more than hesitancy after it was certain what ought to be done. How natural it is to some people is well known, but by effort and practice the tendency can of course be mitigated, if not cured. North-Londoners, from association with her, got into the way of resembling her to some extent in this respect. It became the habit of the place—may it long continue—to get under way with one’s piece of work the instant one knew what it was. I am very inferior to many of my colleagues in this respect, and only disguise the fact by economy of another kind, which perhaps goes naturally with a more slowly moving will; the economy, namely, of doing my piece of work so that it has not to be done again. But for simpler things there is no call for this economy, and the comfort is great of being surrounded by persons whose instinct it is to translate the idea into the action at once.
“Her energy was her most obvious quality in school. Everybody saw that, and each felt that she individually had to live up to it. Still obvious, but deeper, was her boundless faith in the possibility of achieving good ends. The choice of the school motto, ‘We work in hope,’ was characteristic. She pursued her ends without delay; she pursued them also with the confidence that in some way or other they would one day be gained. About her ends her will would be inflexible; about the means of accomplishing them her invention was elastic, and her mind open. And I suppose few persons in this world ever carried out their ends with so much or such well-deserved success. Her secret was to be uncompromising about essentials only.
“Her faith in the latent possibilities of character, even when most unpromising, amounted to a principle of educational action, which she wielded with marvellous effect, because its hold was even more strong on her heart than on her head. She seemed almost to believe—but this is an exaggeration—that any one could be made to do or become anything. She produced wonderful results in the way of training up efficient workers when others would have despaired; though sometimes she did it at immense cost to herself. She believed in every one, but she would let bad work pass with no one. She was at once the strictest of critics and the least despondent. Thus she made what she would of many, especially of those who had very much to do with her in the earlier years. Not that she was ignorant of their limitations either, but limitations did not trouble her. She had absolutely none of that restless critical spirit which requires that everybody should be made to order, all over again, and different. She took them as they were, loved them, and made the best of them in both senses.
“Every girl was good for something to her eye and in her heart. It was her business—our business—to find out how the most could be made of her, and to make it. And just in proportion as good in people was the reality she saw, so was their evil, for the most part, a transitory unreality. Young people at least are apt to be and do what you expect of them. She dwelt on the good, insisted on it to them, wrestled for it with them, established it in them, and straightway forgot the evil or remembered it only as a passing phase. And the sign of this large-hearted sympathy in an optimistic temperament is shown in the special devotion to Miss Buss of all the so-called naughty girls.
“It is needless to enlarge on her possession of the administrator’s gift of relying with generous trust upon her tried helpers. This, too, was in her a matter of the heart quite as much as of the head. She felt about them as one with her in a joint work of which in all its phases she spoke as ‘ours,’ not as ‘mine.’ It was pleasanter, more natural to her, to be the controlling centre of a plural will than to be a single will governing others with more or less allowance for their freedom. As regards the question of the relation of the head to her assistants, this might be described as the theory of her practice, elastic as all theories must be in a mind of truly practical genius. She believed thoroughly in the legal autocracy of the head as the best form of school government, but in her view of the autocrat’s standard for himself she expected him to exercise rule with due regard for ministers and parliaments.”
CHAPTER X.
THE HEAD-MISTRESSES’ ASSOCIATION.
“L’Union fait la Force.”
Probably none of her public work gave Miss Buss more unqualified satisfaction than the Head-mistresses’ Association, of which the first germ seems to be contained in a passage from one of her Journal-letters of September, 1874, written from Bonaly Tower, Edinburgh—