Why Classics Are for Rich People

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 Powerful Notion of “Classics”

In applying strict standards to language, the humanists sought to elevate the discipline of literature above the attainments of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages had distinguished its own set of auctores, that is, authors whose work exemplified principally grammatical correctness. The auctores were simply the textbooks one used in learning to read and write Latin. The list of auctores was drawn from various periods without regard to historical and stylistic distinctions. Silver Latin (1st and 2nd centuries), late antiquity, and the Middle Ages contributed auctores as well as the Golden Age of Cicero and Vergil.

Under the humanists, the canon of auctores became our notion of the “classics” in the wider sense, that is, works exemplifying the ideal in all respects: morally, intellectually, and artistically as well as linguistically. The canon collected and displayed all the virtues to which European culture aspired, and the works of the canonical authors became the standard against which people judged themselves. Vergil’s pius Aeneas, who led his people out of a defeated Troy and sacrificed the love of the Carthaginian queen Dido to go to Italy and found the Roman people, was no longer just a character in a compelling story; he implicitly reproached anyone who failed to perform his duty to family and country.

The literary canon purports to conserve our ideals and therefore to comprise “the best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold put it. However, the real cultural power comes from the idea of a literary canon, not the specific books on the list. In fact, the books that people consider timeless classics change over time. Each age grows tired of books that the previous era lauded and rediscovers other books that better fit its sensibility. The reputations of all of the great writers suffer their ups and downs: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare…

The notion of a canon itself is what endures. It endures as a style of engagement with books, and it makes the ambitious claim that it defines the culture. It represents an instinct—almost an ideology or an institution—called classicism. Classicism involves an aesthetic predisposition toward balance and restraint (think of Cicero’s sentence), along with a set of obligations for how readers and writers should fulfill classical ideals.