Plato in Wonderland
or 'Beautiful Soup' and Other More Philosophical Ideas

by August A. Imholtz Jr.

Beltsville,
Maryland

Can the already long catalogue of literary influences on Lewis Carroll's Alice books be traced back as far as Plato? At first the question may seem ridiculous, but there are some specific passages in Carroll's most famous work that sound very much like direct echoes of Plato and contextual details, both in the Alice books and Carroll's Oxford life, that further support this unlikely source of inspiration.

I. Beautiful Soup

At the urging of the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle sings the song entitled 'Turtle Soup' in Chapter X of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:[1]

'Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
Soo--oop of the e--e--evening.
Beautiful soup!

It might, one would think, have more appropriately been called 'Beautiful Soup.' Like many of the other songs in the Alice books, however, this one too is a parody of a familiar work. Martin Gardner explained the background details in this way: 'On August 1, 1862, Carroll records in his diary that the Liddell sisters sang for him the popular song 'Star of the Evening.' The words and music were by James M. Sayles.[2]

Beautiful star in heav'n so bright,
Softly falls they silv'ry light,
As thou movest from earth afar,
Star of the evening, beautiful star.

CHORUS:
Beautiful star,
Beautiful star,
Star of the evening, beautiful star

In Plato's Hippias Major dialogue, Socrates encounters the renowned sophist Hippias, recently returned to Athens.[3] Hippias offers to help Socrates answer a troublesome house guest's question about the meaning of 'the beautiful.' The following exchange takes place well into the dialogue (290d):

Hippias. We shall at any rate admit that whatever is appropriate to a particular thing makes that thing beautiful.

Socrates. He [the troublesome guest] will continue, Then when a man boils the pot of which we spoke, the beautiful pot, full of beautiful soup, which is more appropriate to it -- a ladle of gold or a ladle of fig wood?'[4]

It is true that the Greek word 'kalon' ('beautiful') can be used to describe ordinary things, e.g. wine, armour, buildings. And yet Plato may be making fun of Hippias here as he does throughout the dialogue. The conjunction of 'beautiful' with 'soup' is far from Hippias' original though vague ideas of the beautiful. In addition, the word Plato uses for soup -- etnos -- is a vulgar word from Greek comedy. Aristophanes uses it together with the other soup accoutrement words in his play The Birds at line 78: 'Does he want soup? Then where's the pot and ladle?'

When Socrates, again pretending to quote his troublesome guest [another instance of Socratic irony for clearly there is no 'guest' and it is Socrates himself who is being a trouble to Hippias] asks 'What about a beautiful pot? Is it, then, not beautiful?', Hippias objects to so uncultured a person who would mention such things [i.e., 'beautiful pot' in this passage but his objection is equally applicable to 'beautiful soup'] in a dignified discussion. Soup and pots have no role in an analysis of the beautiful. Only much later in Western literature, in Wonderland actually, does one come upon 'beautiful soup' again.

In her commentary on the Hippias Major, Dorothy Tarrant calls this passage 'a beautiful application of 'kalon' in anticipation of the Mock Turtle's song in Alice in Wonderland' but she does not realise that there is more here than just the echo or anticipation of 'beautiful soup.'[5] Socrates is trying in this dialogue to elicit a definition of 'beauty' from the great sophist Hippias. At first Hippias answers, as noted above, that 'a beautiful girl is beautiful.' Socrates quickly disposes of this statement by arguing that beauty is relative, i.e., compared with a beautiful maiden the most beautiful pot is ugly and likewise the most beautiful young girl, compared with the gods, is also ugly (288E-289A). The beauty of young girls was a subject of deep fascination to Lewis Carroll. In his letter of May 31, 1880 he writes to a Mrs. Henderson about his desire to photograph her young daughters sans habiliment and says:

Given Carroll's lifelong interest in young girls, does it not make sense that the central subject matter of the Hippias Major might have been of particular interest to him? And would not Plato's 'beautiful soup' have appealed to his sense of humour, even to the point of using the phrase to parody Sayles?[7]

On the other hand, there is, however, no direct evidence I am aware of that Carroll had actually read the Hippias Major in Greek, as he could have done given his background in Classics [he gained a second in Classical Moderations], or in the several English translations available to him e.g., Sydenham's 18th century translation of the Platonic dialogues reprinted in 1804, Cary's edition in the Bohn Library in 1804, and Whewell's collected edition in the 1850s. Perhaps more importantly, Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, had been lecturing on Plato at Oxford since the late 1840 and in 1853 introduced Plato's Republic into the curriculum of set works in Greek. During the 1850s and 1860s Jowett worked on his translation of Plato which, upon its publication in 1868, became a monument of Victorian scholarship. Carroll knew Jowett, having opposed the increase of the Regius Professor's salary in his pamphlet 'The New Method of Evaluation as Applied to Pi' and scarcely could have been ignorant of the furor of Platonic activity emanating from Jowett's Balliol College. It is therefore very puzzling that the auction catalogues of the contents of Lewis Carroll's personal library do not list any Greek or English editions of Plato.[8] True, there are many references to 'lots' containing 'other books' as well as listings for authors with whom Carroll would have disagreed on any number of points, e.g., John Henry Cardinal Newman, as he certainly differed with Jowett. With Benjamin Jowett and George Grote, whose three volume Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates was published in 1865, and others at work on Plato, clearly Plato was very much a part of the Oxford intellectual climate of the 1860s, Carroll's most creative decade. Carroll's own Christ Church colleague, John Alexander Stewart, was working on Plato during that period. So it is an omission from the albeit incomplete listings of the contents of Carroll's library that I cannot explain away, rather like the little man who wasn't there in the nursery rhyme.

II. Minding your own business

Another attempt to find a specific echo of Plato in the Alice books concerns a statement first made by the Duchess in Chapter VI, Pig and Pepper, of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

T.E. Crawford traces that assertion back to the famous conclusion reached in Plato's Republic, 433b, that justice consists in 'doing one's own business and not being a busybody.'[10] He may well be correct, I think; but there is more happening than Crawford sees in his brief note. The situation is important. The enraged cook in the Duchess' kitchen, having removed her cauldron of hot soup [note 'soup' again!] from the fire, begins throwing pans, plates and dishes at the oblivious Duchess and her soon-to-be-a-pig baby. Alice implores the cook: 'Oh, please mind what you're doing.' To which the Duchess replies, picking up on the verb 'mind', regardless of the chaos around her, 'If everybody minded...etc.' This is hardly a just situation by Platonic or any other standard. Indeed, Alice wonders whether the baby would have been murdered if she had not rescued it.

Later in Chapter IX, Alice and the Duchess have the following exchange:

'The game's going on rather better now,' [Alice] said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.

'Tis so,' said the Duchess: and the moral of that is 'Oh, tis love, tis love that makes the world go round!''

'Somebody said, ' Alice whispered, 'that it's done by everybody minding their own business!'

'Ah well! It means the same thing,' said the Duchess.

In Chapter V, Advice from a Caterpillar, the question 'Who are you?' brings to mind Socrates' maxim 'Know thyself.'[11] Alice is trying to discover who she is in Wonderland and who she will become in Looking-Glass. In the Hippias Major, the Euthrypho, the Republic, etc. Socrates is always seeking, with great irony, definitions of the 'Good,' the meaning of 'Justice,' etc. In Wonderland and Looking-Glass land the meaning, even the being of, Alice, the Kings, and the Queens, all come into question, usually with irony. Carrollian irony may not be as common as Socratic irony, but it often concerns equally serious subjects. Here are just a few examples:

1) The Magpie says: 'I really must be getting home: the night air doesn't suit my throat.'[12]
2) The Duchess says to Alice 'Right as usual, what a clear way you have of putting things.'[13]
3) The Gnat, responding to Alice's question 'Why do things have names at all?' replies 'I can't say.' [By the way, a very Cratylean question.][14]

Finally, it is also possible to identify a strain of etymological play in the Alice books that recalls Plato's own etymological efforts in the Cratylus. For example, a tree in the Garden of Live Flowers is said to bark because its says Bough-Wough and that is why its branches are called boughs. This may well be a reference to Friedrich Max Muller and his famous discussion of the 'bow-wow' theory of the origin of language and thus another example of Carroll's recondite humorous allusions to his fellow Oxford dons and their theories.[15] Furthermore, Humpty Dumpty's exegesis of the meanings of the words of the poem 'Jabberwocky' are Cratylean in their tortuousness: for example, 'It's called a wabe' you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it.'

It may be possible to say of Carroll's artistry in the Alice books what the romantic critic Friedrich Schlegel, now so much in disfavour, said of Socratic irony: 'In it is to be included all jest, all earnest, everything transparently open and everything deeply concealed.'[16] To which I would modestly add another touch of Plato, just as Socrates goes down to the Piraeus at the beginning of the Republic, so Alice goes down the rabbit hole. Are they not each a symbolic katabasis?