In Oscar Wilde and Nihilism, Colin Cavendish-Jones argues that Oscar Wilde "arrived independently at the same conclusion as Friedrich Nietzsche: that art is the only superior counterforce to nihilism" (3). The thesis itself should not arouse much debate, at least as a summation of Wilde's position. Indeed, it is a truism. The controversy lies in the detail of Cavendish-Jones's argument, as we shall see.
The conjunction of Wilde and Nietzsche is interesting for several reasons, not least the coincidence that Wilde arrived at broadly Nietzschean conclusions without any acquaintance with the writings of Nietzsche, the pre-eminent philosopher of nineteenth-century European nihilism. Wilde was a Francophile who had no German, and he was in Reading Prison when he might otherwise have encountered the first readily available English translations of Nietzsche and Havelock Ellis's three essays on Nietzsche that appeared in The Savoy in 1896. [1] Following Wilde's release from prison in 1897, neither his surviving correspondence nor others' reminiscences suggest that he encountered Nietzsche’s work prior to either his or Nietzsche's death in 1900.
Contemporaries, however, observed similarities between their respective outlooks. In philosopher Max Nordau's bestselling Degeneration (1895), published in English translation only a couple of months before Wilde’s catastrophe, Nordau contends that in the works of Wilde and Nietzsche can be found clear "echoes" if not "almost the very words," each of the other, and he holds up both writers as exemplary cases of what he condemned as fin-de-siècle "degeneracy." [2] In the ensuing decades, other commentators, such as George Bernard Shaw, André Gide, and Thomas Mann, would draw less hostile and more nuanced parallels between the pair.
This thought-provoking, always articulate, and often witty book is, happily, not a comparative study of Wilde and Nietzsche as philosophers of nihilism. Previous treatments of Wilde as a modern or postmodern philosopher have produced thin gruel, whilst a comparison of Nietzsche and Wilde on the topic of nihilism would be hopelessly lopsided. While Nietzsche's thought is nothing other than a sustained meditation on nihilism, Wilde rarely thematises nihilism as such. Instead his writings comprise a brilliant and variegated answer to the nihilistic intellectual mood of the European fin de siècle.
Oscar Wilde and Nihilism explores Wilde's response to nihilism via readings of key texts in Wilde's oeuvre: the early play, Vera, or the Nihilists (1880), Wilde's response to the political and specifically Russian nihilism of his age; the fairy tales published as The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891); his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); his "political" essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), and the four social comedies staged between 1892 and 1895; and lastly, the posthumously published De Profundis (1905), which Cavendish-Jones describes as "Wilde's struggle with nihilism at its most dramatic and elemental" (158). Conspicuously absent from this selection are Wilde's most significant essays on aesthetics, "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist," collected in Intentions (1891) — omissions to which I shall return. In the concluding chapter, Cavendish-Jones discusses two of Wilde's most venerable literary heirs and their respective responses to nihilism: André Gide and Marcel Proust, pressing the case for Wilde as a model for the Baron de Charlus in Proust's novel, In Search of Lost Time, amongst other things.
The lengthy introductory chapter has the dual purpose of reaching a working definition of nihilism and delineating the intellectual milieu in which Wilde came of age, concentrating on how Romanticism generated nihilism whilst also suggesting the resources to counter it. While Cavendish-Jones implies that later chapters will rely on his extensive preparations, this proves not to be the case. To employ an architectural metaphor, the author sinks unnecessarily deep foundations on which to erect a relatively bijou edifice. Cavendish-Jones himself seems to harbour reservations on this matter, noting parenthetically that the introduction is somewhat long (3).
This point aside, the ensuing discussion has various merits. If one of the highest compliments payable to a work of criticism is that it sends the reader back to its source material, then the compliment is owed to Cavendish-Jones, not least in his readings of Vera and the fairy stories. The Vera chapter develops the claim that the character of Prince Paul is Wilde's "own version of the Übermensch," anticipating "both Nietzsche and Shaw in his dramatic conception of the higher man" (55). As such, Paul is also the "play’s spokesman for art" (58-9). While Cavendish-Jones offers an intelligent discussion of an overlooked play, he loads a great deal of argumentative weight, perhaps too much, on Paul's shoulders. There are also issues with the reference to Nietzsche: Cavendish-Jones conflates Nietzsche's "higher man" with the Übermensch, Nietzschean concepts that need to be held apart.
In the following chapter, on Wilde's fairy tales, Cavendish-Jones emphasises the "cosmic nihilism" (4) of the tales, noting their collective mise-en-scène as a chaotic universe devoid of meaning. Although Cavendish-Jones grants that the stories contain "isolated moments of moral order," he argues that, rather than pointing to a promise of ultimate redemption, such moments instead serve to emphasise the "essential randomness" of existence (89).
The Dorian Gray chapter has an interesting line on the character of Lord Henry Wotton, contending that if Lord Henry "would have his followers [become] aesthetes," Wilde, on the other hand, "would have them [become] artists" (112). The distinction is central to Cavendish-Jones's overall argument: the aesthete may tend to nihilism — Lord Henry is a case study in that — but the act of artistic creation "is the ultimate cure for nihilism" (112). The subsequent chapter develops this thesis by way of the Soul of Man, acknowledging that as a "political plan" the essay is "entirely useless" (125), and that its significance is as a platform for Wilde to articulate his contra-nihilistic and aestheticized version of individual "self-realisation" (125). Cavendish-Jones then turns to the "increasingly anarchic trend" (147) of the social comedies, a discussion that culminates in an argument for The Importance of Being Earnest (1899) as Wilde's most exuberant creative "cure" (112) for nihilism prior to the disaster of 1895. Cavendish-Jones closes with an accomplished flourish of his own: "The author begins with his feet planted firmly in mid-air: no duties, no responsibilities, and no certainties. He can go in any direction and create whatever he wants. [...] it is perfect freedom" (147).
Appropriately, Cavendish-Jones's concludes with a reading of De Profundis in which he examines how Wilde's incarceration prompted a re-examination of his response to nihilism. Here, Wilde brings Christ to the fore as the "supreme" individualist (158) and Romantic "precursor" (172) whose "achievement is essentially that of an artist: to change people’s minds, to make them feel different, to distract them" (164). These claims are placed alongside Wilde’s distinctly anti-theological assertion that cosmic nihilism prevails: "suffering can be turned to good account by the artist; it cannot be explained in universal terms" (171). Cavendish-Jones argues that Wilde's aim in De Profundis is to affirm the suffering brought about by his downfall, with reference to Wilde's insistence that "'humility in the artist [...] is his frank acceptance of all experiences'" (162). Cavendish-Jones’s case is well made, though a potential parallel with Nietzsche might have been fruitfully explored. Wilde's doctrine of humility in De Profundis resonates with Nietzsche's famous doctrine of the eternal return, especially the formulation in The Joyful Science (1882) entitled "The greatest weight" (§341). Here, Wilde says "yes" to his near catastrophic suffering; in the words of Nietzsche’s "demon," he "crave[s] nothing more than this eternal confirmation and seal." [3]
Curiously, Cavendish-Jones fails to engage with Wilde's essays on aesthetics. I highlight this omission for two reasons. In a book with an overlong introductory chapter that in addition surrenders sixty of its two hundred and twenty pages to end-of-chapter notes, room might have been made for the missing discussion. Moreover, consideration of Wilde's essays on aesthetics would have strengthened Cavendish-Jones's proposition, offering an opportunity to consider Wilde's lavish indebtedness to classical Greek philosophy: Plato au fond, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in particular. [4] Understanding Wilde's ethic of aesthetic individualism — and thereby his response to nihilism — is obscured if his eclectic reading of Aristotle's Ethics is overlooked.
The obvious places to turn for Wilde's engagement with Aristotle are "The Decay of Lying" and, most importantly, "The Critic as Artist." Cavendish-Jones mentions these essays in passing but never treats them at length, leading to some hasty appraisals. For example, whilst Cavendish-Jones is right to say that Wilde places "aesthetics and ethics not in opposition [...] but in relation" (206), he repeatedly muddles the broader Aristotelian sense of the ethical, related to questions regarding the most fully realised human life, and the narrower sense of moral rules and prohibitions. When, in "The Critic as Artist," Gilbert claims that "[a]esthetics are higher than ethics" (206), there is more at issue than simply the subsumption of ethics into aesthetics; Wilde's position is a somewhat humdrum aestheticism if this is indeed his argument. But it isn't. Wilde is asserting the supremacy of aesthetics over a morality of rules and prohibitions, but it is a fundamentally ethical supremacy related to living the best human life. This is the Aristotelian Wilde: an aestheticized Aristotle, stripped of natural teleology, who contends that aesthetic "self-culture" is the response to nihilism. As Gilbert puts it: "self-culture is the true ideal of man [...] the conception of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised." [5] Incidentally, this is also the Wilde who resonates with an influential interpretation of Nietzsche's Übermensch, anticipating the focus on self-fashioning in Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. [6] All that being said, it is important to note that the fault of muddling the ethical and the moral is not originally Cavendish-Jones's: Wilde himself repeatedly clouds the conceptual waters. But then Wilde was not, nor ever claimed to be, a philosopher.
These caveats aside, Oscar Wilde and Nihilism is an interesting book that rises to the challenge of a momentous topic. To extend the architectural metaphor: were the book an English Heritage property, I should certainly recommend a visit.
Notes
[1] Havelock Ellis's three-part article on "Friedrich Nietzsche" appeared in the April, July, and August numbers of The Savoy that year.
[2] Nordau 1895, 443.
[3] Nietzsche 2023, 204-5.
[4] In the secondary literature, the topic of Wilde-as-classicist is better addressed than that of Wilde-as-philosopher. See, for example, Iain Ross's Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013).
[5] Wilde 2018, 170.
[6] See, for instance, Sartre's Existentialism & Humanism.
Links to Related Material
- British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists
- Wilde's De Profundis
- Oscar Wilde: Literary Relations
Bibliography
[Book under review] Cavendish-Jones, Colin. Oscar Wilde and Nihilism. London: Routledge, 2025.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Science. In The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 6. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. William F. Barry. London: Heinemann, 1895.
Ross, Iain. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism & Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. New York: Methuen, 2007.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist,” in In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man under Socialism and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Martin. London: Verso, 2018.
Created 2 September 2025