Introduction

When Walter Pater (1839–94) was asked by a friend what his ‘favourite intimate passages’ were, foremost was the maxim of Plato: ‘Honour the soul; for each man’s soul changes, according to the nature of his deeds, for better or worse.’1 Many of the motivations in Pater’s work can be found in this statement. The Platonic imperative makes a great claim for the power of influence—the power of art upon one, for example, as both an observer and a creator—so that one’s consideration of influence becomes as scrupulous as religion, a sort of religion of the awareness or consciousness of one’s surroundings. The maxim also commands respect for self and self-knowledge, towards which Plato’s Socrates urges his interlocutors, which education alone helps to cultivate. The statement blends the concrete with the metaphysical, furthermore, patently arguing for people to inform their own malleable characters. Plato’s aesthetics include ethics because he finds people so susceptible to their environment: ‘men’s souls are’, writes Pater in his final book, ‘according to Plato’s view, the creatures of what men see and hear’ (...