In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV founded the Académie Française as a mechanism for policing the language, defining the literary canon, and promoting classical ideals. His patronage and the patronage of the nobles at his court determined which writers and scholars—and therefore which ideas—got support.
The French academic establishment, led by fashion-setting critics such as Nicolas Boileau, forced writers to adhere strictly to literary forms as defined by ancient literary theorists. In the Poetics, Aristotle said that tragedies observe a unity of time, place, and action. That is, the action in a play unfolds within a short period of time (ideally one day) in one location, and forms an organic whole (does not consist of disjointed scenes). Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, from whose work Aristotle derived his theory of tragic form, never strictly observed these three unities, but French dramatists were forced to. Thus, Corneille and Racine exemplify Aristotle’s rules for tragedy more purely than the ancient Athenians who served as Aristotle’s model.
In the eighteenth century, classicism spread to Germany and across Europe. It also began to apply beyond ancient literature itself; any work of art that exhibited classical sensibilities qualified. “The concept of the ‘classical’ has, so we see, a very humble and prosaic origin,” wrote Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948. “In the last two hundred years it has become unduly and immeasurably inflated.”[i]
The nascent middle class adopted classicism as a hallmark of taste, a guarantee of refinement. Around 1785, for instance, English concertgoers first codified the repertoire that forms the kernel of what we know today as “classical music,” the compositions of greats such as Bach and Handel. Up to that time, music simply reflected popular tastes as new composers came on the scene, one after another, had their vogue, and then started to sound old-fashioned. By contrast, the basic cultural function of classical music is to be timeless; it never goes out of style (yet never belongs wholly to the present, either). As with the humanists placing Cicero at the head of the canon of Latin prose, the canon of classical music answers the question, “What makes music good?” Only people at leisure ask abstract questions like this. For this reason, classical music or any other form of classicism is not formed to address the needs of someone engaged with the immediate demands of the world.
[i] Curtius, pp. 249-250.
The Future of Reading 