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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: lesson they are to draw from it.
All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern
progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for
the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,'
are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has
fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions:
it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of
such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions.
'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great
men and the principle of Beauty.'
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