De Absentibus Nil Nisi Bonum

“ You are absent-minded.” “ Very likely. Perhaps I was thinking about the absent ; and in thinking about the absent, naturally one grows absent-minded.”

“ I have a theory, — that the absent are always forgotten.”

“ Not quite always. They are occasionally remembered ; but if so, it is by a fewabsent - minded ones who in any company are themselves (like the absent-bodied ones) liable to be forgotten, unless their absentmindedness, by causing some annoyance in the conversation, brings them up roundly.”

“ The judicious pleader for the absent is a rather uncommon person. I have sometimes thought silence the best kindness. Possibly, we never speak of the absent without some subtle effect of disparagement, however unconsciously produced. Indeed, when least intended, this is often the case.”

“ I understand. You mean praise. The modest man (absent as he is) suffers through not being on hand, to temper by his characteristic demeanor the effect of injudicious laudation on the minds of those who are treated to his praises.”

“ Yes, that is it, exactly. If I don’t know Pythias, and do know Damon, Damon sits down before me with a catalogue of the virtues of Pythias, whom it is desired that I should know. I exclaim, ’ Don’t say anything more in his praise, or I shall hate him in advance ! ’ This really happened in my experience, very lately.”

“ Is it not a curious fact that our friends’ friends turn out so little like the presentments that have been given us ? I suppose it is because some detail of appearance or of character, especially fascinating to the promoting friend, has been so dwelt upon that, perforce, we go to building up the whole man on the one emphasized detail.”

“ We are quite as much to blame for our haste in construction as is the ’ promoting friend ’ for this partiality and inaccuracy in the matter of description. We are bound to have character-gauges. For instance, if I am told of a stranger whom I am to meet that his laughter is of the most hearty and infectious nature, it is quite impossible for me to see mentally a Master Slender ; or if I am told that the stranger is of a sentimental and romantic turn of mind, I could not readily project the image of one in Hamlet’s habit of ’ too too solid flesh.’ Yet these contradictions are often realized. . . . But you are again absent,— farther away than ever ! ”

“ I was thinking of what you said about silence being the ‘best kindness.’ There is such a pathos in the mere fact of absence, and in the implied helplessness of the absent to affect in the least current opinion regarding himself, or the expression of current opinion. But I would make a distinction in the quality and degree of absence, as affecting the interests of the absent one.”

“ What is the distinction ? ”

“ It is this, — whether the absence is remote, necessitated, and covering a long interval, or whether it is transient, with an easy accessibility of persons separated. You may think it altogether a paradox, but true it is that the warm and felt presence of a person and that person’s remote absence are almost equally a vantage-ground to the absent one. Temporary absence is different ; while it lasts, others are allowed to throw the weight of their personalities against the person in question, and there may even be moments of undervaluing his merits ; but remote and prolonged absence is a kind of illuminated presenee-in-memory, in which undervaluing is an impossibility, and in which intervening events and actors count for nothing. When some strict and bitter necessity is involved, then there is a certain sacredness about long absence, as though it were a lighter phase of death, in which, as in actual death, nothing but good is to be said, or even thought.”

“ A test, certainly, of the quality of affection in the one who remembers, and perhaps of the deservingness of the one remembered. Would that I might be thus ” —

“ It is something more. Such absence sometimes clears a perverse vision. Long range with a good glass is better than the nearer-at-hand view, when the nearer-athand view is still too far for the naked eye’s perfect discernment of the object of one’s regard.”

(Mentally.) “ She is using the glass now, and I am too near at hand. The absent are not always forgotten ! ”