“In 1880 I was elected Poor Law Guardian in St. Pancras, for the ward in which Holy Trinity Church stands, where Miss Buss had attended for a long time. Her name secured me much support; without it, I doubt if I should have been returned, for the opposition to Women Guardians was then very great, and the difficulties enormous. Miss Buss’ counsel was most valuable to me at this time as always, so wise and judicious. ‘Forward, but not too fast,’ was ever her motto.”
Here is another word to the same purpose, from an East End hospital:—
“How many lives will be impoverished now! She was so true and great-hearted. Wasn’t it wonderful how she remembered the details of so many lives? She never treated us collectively. My life would have been so different but for the time spent with her. She prepared many for a sharp wrestle with life’s difficulties. And how she remembered one’s home people too!
“Such a wave of sadness comes over me as I think of her; and yet, what a life hers was to rejoice over! So full and generous. Hers was such a rich loving nature. Surely many, thinking of what she has done, may indeed ‘take heart again!’ If I felt less, I might be able to say more.”
We could go on adding witness after witness in those who have thus loved her. One thing only is more wonderful than this general love, and that is the power of loving to which it all came as response. It is by putting together the impressions of complete satisfaction given to each of these many varying needs, that we finally reach some adequate estimate of this grand personality. Each person in any relation to her, had a special and real place in her regard, just as each child has its own place in its mother’s heart—a place of its very own. In this wide heart there was room for all, and each distinct and distinctly separate. There was here no mere jumble of meaningless amiability. The loves and the likings were quite definite. And possibly the dislikings also; but of these no one heard very much. Of hate and scorn there was none for anything but evil itself. Her practice, like her teaching, was “to be merciless to the sin, but very tender to the sinner.”
Almost more telling, in their intensity of regret, than even these thanksgivings for the joy of such a friendship, are the thoughts of one who was “glad just to claim a place among the old pupils” in the crowded church on that sad New Year’s Eve, when every heart in the vast assembly beat in unison in the same love and sorrow. During life there seemed always a vitalizing principle in the influence of the leader thus mourned; and who may measure the latent forces set free in this great wave of feeling?—forces that might help to bring about the hope of these first words—
“As for the public loss, that is greater than we can understand, because we shall never know how much she has done for women till we know how much women will be able to do in the future. But she helped more than women by what she did. She raised the whole standard of life in raising the standard of women’s education.”
And then, in the light of this flash of insight into the greatness of the work, comes a sense of personal loss, in a lament which seems to bear with it the echo of all the sighs of all the women of past ages, who desired and aspired, but yet strove in vain, to break the chains of ignorance that held them bound—chains broken at length by this strong hand!
How many a girl must have inwardly rebelled against the deadening routine of the old conventional schools, though so few had the strength by which this once “timid child” won her own freedom. Measuring what have been by the force of that first never-forgotten impression of the “vigorous intensity that swept her up like a strong wind,” her words of regret that her school-life had not been spent under that influence come as among the saddest of the laments of that sorrowful day—
“Thinking it over after she was gone, a perfect agony of regret came over me that I was not always her pupil. In church, that day, the regret was so pregnant that it almost stupefied me.... When I think that Miss Buss was at our very doors, I can scarcely bear to look back. Think of what I might have been saved—the unutterable loneliness of those five years, the misery, the deliberate fostering, of set purpose, of a morbid self-consciousness and self-distrust. Why, I have never got over it! The deadening effect of those five years clings to me still. I consider that it kept me back fifteen years. Instead of leaving school broken-spirited and irresolute, I should have had the inspiration of knowing that I had been part of the great human movement. As it was, I had to grope my way to modern thought.