CHAPTER V: VISITS.

§ 378. One may go to the house of a blameworthy man to reproach him, or to that of an inferior who is in trouble to give aid, or to that of a reputed oddity to gratify curiosity: a visit is not intrinsically a mark of homage. Visits of certain kinds, however, become extrinsically marks of homage. In its primitive form, making a present implies going to see the person it is made to. Hence, by association, this act comes to be itself indicative of respect, and eventually acquires the character of a reverential ceremony.

From this it results that just as the once-voluntary present grows into the compulsory present, and ends in tribute periodically paid; so the concomitant visit loses its voluntary character, and, as political supremacy strengthens, becomes an expression of subordination demanded by the ruler at stated intervals.

§ 379. Naturally this ceremony takes no definite shape where chiefly power is undecided; and hence is not usual in simple tribes. Even in societies partially compounded, it characterizes less the relations between the common people and the rulers next above them, than the relations between these subordinate rulers and superior rulers. Still there are places where subjects show their local heads the consideration implied by this act. Some of the Coast Negroes, the Joloffs for example, come daily to their village chiefs Edition: current; Page: [109] to salute them; and among the Kaffirs, the Great Place (as the chief’s residence is termed) is the resort of all the principal men of the tribe, who attend “for the purpose of paying their respects to the chief.”

But, as just implied, the visits chiefly to be noted as elements in ceremonial government, are those which secondary rulers and officials of certain grades are required to pay. In a compound society headed by a chief who has been victorious over other chiefs, there arises the need for periodic demonstrations of allegiance. Habitually the central ruler, knowing that these subjugated local rulers must chafe under their humiliation, and ever suspecting conspiracies among them, insists on their frequently recurring presence at his place of residence. He thus satisfies himself in two ways: he receives re-assurances of loyalty by gifts brought and homage performed, while he gets proof that his guests are not then engaged in trying to throw off his yoke.

Hence the fact that in compound societies the periodic visit to the king is a political ceremony. Concerning a conquered people in ancient Peru, we read that the Yncas “ordered that, during certain months in the year, the native chiefs should reside at the court of Cuzco;” and, speaking of other subordinate rulers, F. de Xeres says—“Some of these chiefs [who came to visit Atahuallpa] were lords of 30,000 Indians, all subject to Atahuallpa.” In ancient Mexico a like usage is shown to have had a like origin. From the chiefs of the conquered province of Chalco, certain indications of submission were required; and “Montezuma II. asked them, besides, to come to Mexico twice a-year, and so take part in the festivals.” Africa in our own day furnishes an illustration showing at once the motive for the usage and the reluctant feeling with which it is sometimes conformed to. In Ashantee,

“At that great annual festival [the yam-custom] all the caboceers and captains, and the greater number of the tributary kings or chiefs, Edition: current; Page: [110] are expected to appear in the capital. . . . Sometimes a chief who suspects that he has become obnoxious to the king, will not trust himself in the capital without the means of defence or intimidation.”

Further, as showing how in Africa the visit is a recognized expression of subordination, we have the fact that “it is not ‘etiquette’ for the king of Dahomey to visit even his highest officers.” And then Madagascar and Siam yield instances in which the political meaning of the visit is shown by making it to a proxy ruler. Ellis mentions certain Malagasy chiefs as “going to the residence of the governor, to present their homage to the sovereign’s representative, according to the custom of the country at this season;” and, speaking of the “thirteen other kings” in his dominions who every year pay tribute to the king of Siam, Bowring quotes evidence that “formerly they used to come to the city of Odiaà to make their sumbaya (which was to kiss the sword of their Grand Señor); and now, by the Royal command, they come to make it before his viceroy.” Writing in the seventeenth century, Tavernier describes the extreme to which this kind of ceremony was carried in the empire of the Mogul. “All those that are at Court are oblig’d, under a considerable Penalty, to come twice every day to salute the King in the Assembly, once about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, when he renders justice; and the second time about six hours at night.” And such scepticism as we might reasonably feel concerning this statement, is removed on finding that at the present time in Jummoo and Kashmir, the Maharaja receives bi-diurnal visits from “all of a certain standing.” Till lately, Japan furnishes various illustrations of the usage and its meanings. There was the yearly visit made by the secular monarch to the Mikado, originally in person and then by proxy; there were the yearly visits of the nobles to court—the superior ones doing homage to the emperor himself and the inferior ones to his ministers; and, still more significantly, there were the recurring migrations of certain lords, Edition: current; Page: [111] the Siomio, who were “allowed but six months stay in their hereditary dominions; the other half-year they must spend in the imperial capital, Jedo, where their wives and families are kept all the year round as hostages of their fidelity.”

How in feudal Europe like customs arose from like causes, the reader will need only to be reminded. Periodical visits were made by vassals to their suzerains and by these to their higher suzerains—the kings; prolonged residences at places of government grew out of these periodical visits; and the payment of such visits having come to be a recognized expression of allegiance, absence on the appointed occasions was considered a sign of insubordination. As says de Tocqueville, giving an interpretation which partially recognizes the origin of the usage:—

“The abandonment of a country life by the nobility [in France] . . . was, no doubt, an idea almost always pursued by the kings of France, during the three last centuries of the monarchy, to separate the gentry from the people, and to attract the former to Court and to public employments. This was especially the case in the seventeenth century, when the nobility were still an object of fear to royalty.”

To which facts add that among ourselves down to the present day, going to court at intervals, expected specially of all who hold official positions above a certain grade, and expected generally of members of the governing classes, is taken as an expression of loyalty; and continued absence is interpreted as a mark of disrespect, bringing disfavour.

§ 380. In the last chapter we saw that to deceased persons as well as to living persons, propitiatory presents are made. We have now to observe that in the one case as in the other visits are entailed.

As in primitive beliefs, the powers of men’s ghosts are greater than were those of the men themselves, it results that present-making visits to the dead begin even earlier than do those to the living. In § 83 it was shown that Edition: current; Page: [112] among the Innuits (Esquimaux), who have no chiefs, and therefore no visits expressing political allegiance, there are occasional journeys with gifts to the graves of departed relations. In § 85 instances of such periodic journeys performed by various peoples, savage and semi-civilized, were given. And in § 144 we saw how, in subsequent stages, these grow into quasi-religious and religious pilgrimages.

Here, from the usages of more advanced peoples, may be given two examples showing how close is the relation between these visits paid to the deified and undeified dead, and visits paid to the living. Describing the observances on All Saints’ Day in Spain, Rose writes—“This festival is observed for three days, and . . . the streets are filled with holiday-makers. Yet none of these forget to walk down to the house of their dead, and gaze on it with respect.” And then in Japan, where sacred and secular are but little differentiated, these visits made to gods, ancestors, superiors, and equals, are intimately associated. Says Kœmpfer:—

“Their festivals and holidays are days sacred rather to mutual compliments and civilities, than to acts of holiness and devotion, for which reason they call them also rebis, which implies as much as visiting days. It is true, indeed, that they think it a duty incumbent on them, on those days, to go to the temple of Tensio Dai Sin, the first and principal object of their worship, and the temples of their other gods and deceased great men. . . . Yet the best part of their time is spent with visiting and complimenting their superiors, friends, and relations.”

As further proving how important in super-ceremonious Japan is the visit as a mark of subordination, while it also discloses a curious sequence from the Japanese theory that their sacred monarch rules the other world as well as this world, let me add an extract showing that the gods themselves pay visits.

“All the other kamis or gods of the country are under an obligation to visit him [the Mikado, the living kami] once a year, and to wait upon his sacred person, though in an invisible manner, during the tenth month . . . which is by them called Kaminatsuki, that is, Edition: current; Page: [113] the month without gods . . . because the gods are supposed not to be at home in their temples, but at court waiting upon their Dairi.”

These and many kindred facts force on us the conclusion that from propitiatory visits, now to the living and now to the dead, have been developed those visits of worship which we class as religious. When we watch in a continental cemetery, relatives periodically coming to hang fresh immortelles round tombs, and observe how the decayed wreaths on unvisited tombs are taken to imply lack of respect for the dead—when we remember how in Catholic countries journeys are made with kindred feelings to the shrines of semi-deified men called saints—when we note that between pilgrimages of this kind and pilgrimages made in days gone by to the Holy Sepulchre, the differences are simply between the distances travelled and the ascribed degrees of holiness of the places; we see that the primitive man’s visit to the grave, where the ghost is supposed to reside, originates the visit to the temple regarded as the residence of the god, and that both are allied to visits of reverence to the living. Remote as appear the going to church and the going to court, they are divergent forms of the same thing. That which once linked the two has now almost lapsed; but we need only go back to early times, when a journey to the abode of a living superior had the purpose of carrying a present, doing homage, and expressing submission, while the journey to a temple was made for offering oblations, professing obedience, uttering praises, to recognize the parallelism. Before the higher creeds arose, the unseen ruler visited by the religious worshipper was supposed to be present in his temple, just as much as was the seen ruler visited at his court; and though now the presence of the unseen ruler in his temple is conceived in a vaguer way, he is still supposed to be in closer proximity than usual.

§ 381. As with other ceremonies so with this ceremony. What begins as a propitiation of the most powerful man—now Edition: current; Page: [114] living, now dead, now apotheosized—extends as a propitiation of men who are less powerful; and, continuing to spread, finally becomes a propitiation of equals.

How, as tacitly expressing subordination, the visit comes to be looked for by one who claims superiority, and to be recognized as an admission of inferiority by one who pays it, is well shown in a story which Palgrave narrates. Feysul, king of the Wahhabees, ordered his son Sa’ood to pay a visit to Abd-Allah, an elder brother. “ ‘I am the stranger guest, while he is an inhabitant of the town,’ replied Sa’ood, ‘and it is accordingly his duty to call first on me.’ ” . . . Feysul entreated Abd-Allah “to fulfil the obligation of a first visit. But the elder son proved no less intractable.”

Peoples in various parts of the world supply facts having kindred meanings. The old traveller Tavernier, writes that “the Persians are very much accustom’d to make mutual Visits one to another at their solemn Festivals. The more noble sort stay at home to expect the Visits of their Inferiors.” So in Africa. Of a rich Indian trader, living at Unyanyembe, Grant says—“Moosah sat from morn till night . . . receiving salutes and compliments from the rich and poor.” Passing to Europe we have, in ancient Rome, the morning calls of clients on their patrons. And in an old French book of manners translated into English in the seventeenth century, we read—“A great person is to be visited often, and his health to be inquir’d after.”

These instances sufficiently indicate that gradual descent of the visit of ceremony which has finally brought it down to an ordinary civility—a civility which, however, still bears traces of its origin; since it is regarded more as due from an inferior to a superior than conversely, and is taken as a condescension when paid by a superior to an inferior. Evidently the morning call is a remote sequence of that system under which a subordinate ruler had from time to Edition: current; Page: [115] time to show loyalty to a chief ruler by presenting himself to do homage.

§ 382. In this case as in preceding cases, we have, lastly, to note the relations between visit-making and types of social organization.

That in simple tribes without settled headships, it cannot become a political ceremony is obvious; and that it begins to prevail in societies compounded to the second and third degrees, the evidence clearly shows. As before, however, so now, we find on grouping and comparing the facts that it is not so much with the size of the society as with its structure, that this ceremony is connected. Being one of the expressions of obedience, it is associated with development of the militant organization. Hence as proved by the instances given, it grows into a conspicuous element of ceremonial rule in nations which are under those despotic forms of government which militancy produces—ancient Mexico and ancient Peru in the New World, China and Japan in the East. And the earlier stages of European societies exemplified the relation.

The converse relation is no less manifest. Among ourselves, characterized as we now are by predominance of industrialism over militancy, the visit as a manifestation of loyalty is no longer imperative. And in the substitution of cards for calls, we may observe a growing tendency to dispense with it as a formality of social intercourse.