The rebellious Nietzschean impulse is found in three particular aspects of Wilde’s life and thought. First, the artist is the greatest exemplar of how life should be lived because the artist creates and performs; he does not simply conform to the crowd or, as Nietzsche might have expressed it, to “the morality of the herd.”6 As Wilde declares, Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.7
