The Water-Babies

The soul as the sea-god Glaucus. In the Republic (611c-612a) Socrates says that we see the soul as men saw the sea-god Glaucus, whose first nature can hardly be made out, because the waves have worn his limbs, and shells and weed have grown over him. To see the soul truly we must imagine it lifted out of the sea and scraped clean. When the fairies wash Tom, “his whole husk and shell” comes away, and “the pretty little real Tom” swims out (ch. II). Kingsley’s own seashore book is called Glaucus (1855), but it tells the Roman poet Ovid’s fable of Glaucus the fisherman, who ate a magic herb and followed the fish into the sea, not Plato’s image. The link to the Republic is this edition’s.

The curable and those they wronged. The Phaedo myth of the underworld (113d-114b) has a place for sinners whose crimes were great but curable, among them men who in anger did violence to a father or mother. They are thrown into Tartarus, the deepest pit of the underworld, and after a year the current carries them out to the Acherusian lake, where they cry out to those they killed or wronged and beg to be let go. If their victims relent, their sufferings end, and if not, they are swept back. Grimes wronged two people, the mother he ran away from and the boy he beat. Tom has already forgiven him, saying that it is “all past and gone” (ch. VIII), and his mother’s tears have fallen on him every evening as hail. Here Kingsley parts from Plato, for neither Tom’s tears nor his mother’s can free Grimes, and only his own tears do. He is sent to Etna, and the same myth makes the lava of volcanoes on earth an offshoot of the underworld’s river of fire (113b), while Kingsley, in his sermon of 1867, recalled the medieval belief that Etna was a mouth of hell.

Prometheus turned round. In the myth of the Protagoras (320c-322d) the gods charge the brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus with equipping the new mortal creatures, and Epimetheus, who is not very wise, spends every gift on the beasts and leaves man naked. Prometheus steals fire and the arts to save him. At the end of the dialogue (361d) Socrates says that he prefers Prometheus to Epimetheus, and that he takes forethought, the gift of Prometheus, for his own life, which is as near as the dialogue comes to a verdict on the brothers. Mother Carey reverses the judgement. Her Epimetheus is slow and humble and always looks behind him, and his children are “the men of science” (ch. VII), while the children of Prometheus are “the fanatics, and the theorists, and the bigots” (ch. VII). The reversal is Kingsley’s, and reading it as an answer to Socrates is this edition’s idea. Either way it makes a myth of induction, the scientist’s method of reasoning from observed facts to general laws, and Tom obeys the myth by walking backward to the end of the world.

Wings and recollection. In the Phaedrus (246a-249d) the soul is likened to a pair of winged horses and their charioteer. While its wings are whole it travels with the gods, but through forgetfulness and wickedness it grows heavy, sheds its wings and falls into an earthly body, and it recovers them only by recollection of what it once saw. Later in the dialogue (251a-252b) the lover, gazing at a beautiful face, feels the wing begin to grow again, the quills swelling and aching like a child’s new teeth. The book has its own versions of these images. Mother Carey tells Tom that he should know the way, “for you have been there already”, and as he looks into her eyes he “recollected the way perfectly” (ch. VII), losing it again whenever he looks away. Ellie is given wings after her fall on the rocks (ch. IV), the Gairfowl, who scorns flight, is the last of her kind (ch. VII), and Tom and Ellie, reunited, gaze at each other for seven years (ch. VIII).

Nature that makes by contemplation. The closest ancient analogue to Mother Carey comes from the third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus. In his treatise on nature and contemplation (Enneads III.8.2) he says that nature makes without hands or feet or tools, so that we must not picture her working with levers like a craftsman, and that the power which makes stays whole and at rest. Asked why she makes, nature answers (III.8.4) that the questioner should understand in silence, as she is silent, for what comes into being is what she contemplates, and the shapes of bodies fall from her as she gazes. Mother Carey sits “quite still with her chin upon her hand” (ch. VII) while creatures stream from her throne, and she tells Tom that she is “never more busy than I am now” (ch. VII). The parallel is a convergence, not a borrowing. In a lecture at the Royal Institution in London, later printed in Health and Education (1874), Kingsley dismissed Neoplatonism, the later Platonism of Plotinus and his followers, as a muddy attempt to organise the superstitions of the Roman world. In his own later writing for children nature is a servant with a Master above her.