The Water-Babies · Chapter
Moral explained
The narrator draws a moral from the parable, warning against cruelty to efts (water-babies who have degenerated due to laziness and dirtiness) and urging kindness, pity, and hope for their eventual redemption through hard work and cleanline
What happens
The narrator draws a moral from the parable, warning against cruelty to efts (water-babies who have degenerated due to laziness and dirtiness) and urging kindness, pity, and hope for their eventual redemption through hard work and cleanliness. The chapter emphasizes the importance of learning lessons, washing, and striving to improve, while reminding readers that the story is a fairy tale not to be taken literally.
Themes in this chapter
Moral Education and Redemption
The chapter explicitly teaches moral lessons about kindness, cleanliness, hard work, and the possibility of redemption for those who amend their ways.
Key passages
“when we see efts in the pond, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into somebody’s workbox, and so come to a bad end.”
Do not torment efts by throwing stones, catching them with pins, or placing them in tanks with sticklebacks that will hurt them.
The narrator advises against cruelty to efts, which are degenerate water-babies.
“For these efts are nothing else but the water-babies who are stupid and dirty, and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean; and, therefore (as comparative anatomists will tell you fifty years hence, though they are not learned enough to tell you now), their skulls grow flat, their jaws grow out, and their brains grow small, and their tails grow long, and they lose all their ribs (which I am sure you would not like to do), and their skins grow dirty and spotted, and they never get into the clear rivers, much less into the great wide sea, but hang about in dirty ponds, and live in the mud, and eat worms, as they deserve to do.”
Efts are water-babies who became stupid and dirty because they refused to learn and keep clean, causing their bodies to deform and forcing them to live in muddy ponds.
The narrator explains the origin of efts as degraded water-babies.
“But that is no reason why you should ill-use them: but only why you should pity them, and be kind to them, and hope that some day they will wake up, and be ashamed of their nasty, dirty, lazy, stupid life, and try to amend, and become something better once more.”
Their degraded state is not an excuse to mistreat them; instead, you should pity them and hope they reform.
The narrator urges compassion and hope for redemption.
“For, perhaps, if they do so, then after 379,423 years, nine months, thirteen days, two hours, and twenty-one minutes (for aught that appears to the contrary), if they work very hard and wash very hard all that time, their brains may grow bigger, and their jaws grow smaller, and their ribs come back, and their tails wither off, and they will turn into water-babies again, and perhaps after that into land-babies; and after that perhaps into grown men.”
If they reform and work hard for an extremely long time, they might gradually transform back into water-babies and eventually into humans.
The narrator speculates on a possible path to redemption through immense effort.
“But remember always, as I told you at first, that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretence: and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true.”
Remember that this is just a fairy story for amusement, so don't take it literally, even if it contains truth.
The narrator reminds readers not to take the tale as factual.