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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: which I mean the age and country in which he is born. All good
art, as I said before, has nothing to do with any particular
century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art;
the conditions that produce that quality are different. And what,
I think, you should do is to realise completely your age in order
completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you
are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century,
but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and
that mere temporal considerations are no principle at all; and that
those who advise you to make your art representative of the
nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your
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