every Man must dance in Chains

Hath any Commentator well accounted for the Limitation which an antient Critic hath set to the Drama, which he will have contain neither more nor less than five acts? Or hath any one living attempted to explain, what the modern Judges of our Theatres mean by that Word low; by which they have happily succeeded in banishing all Humour from the Stage, and have made the Theater as dull as a Drawing-room? Upon all these Occasions, the World seems to have embraced a Maxim of our Law, viz. Cuicunque in Arte sua perito credendum est*: For it seems, perhaps, difficult to conceive that any one should have had enough of Impudence, to lay down dogmatical Rules in any Art or Science without the least Foundation. In such Cases, therefore, we are apt to conclude, there are sound and good Reasons at the Bottom, though we are unfortunately not able to see so far.

Now, in reality, the World have paid too great a Compliment to Critics, and have imagined them Men of much greater Profundity than they really are. From this Complaisance, the Critics have been emboldened to assume a Dictatorial Power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the Masters, and have the Assurance to give Laws to those Authors, from whose Predecessors they originally received them.

...For these Critics being Men of shallow Capacities, very easily mistook mere Form for Substance. They acted as a Judge would, who should adhere to the lifeless Letter of the Law, and reject the Spirit. Little Circumstances which were, perhaps, accidental in a great Author were, by these Critics, considered to constitute his chief Merit, and transmitted as Essentials to be observed by his Successors. To these Encroachments, Time and Ignorance, the two great Supporters of Imposture, gave Authority; and thus, many Rules for good Writing have been established, which have not the least Foundation in Truth or Nature; and which commonly serve for no other purpose than to curb and restrain Genius, in the same Manner as it would have restrained the Dancing-master, had the many excellent Treatises on that Art laid it down as an essential Rule, that every Man must dance in Chains.

- from The History of Tom Jones, 186. The Latin phrase means "Anyone expert in his profession should be believed."

Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives

In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives - but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In non-comic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero's disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must know that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.

This is true even in that great bastion of extreme realism, the academic/literary genre (those who refer to their genre as "serious literature" - as if the rest of us are just kidding). One reason why the academic/literary genre usually reaches such a small fragment of the reading public is because in their pursuit of seriousness, they have beaten down the Romantic impulse wherever it rears its head. But the Romantic impulse is still there. Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives entering midlife crises and trying to make sense of their senseless lives, the heroes always seem to face some uncommon problems, always seem to be extraordinarily contemplative and perceptive, always seem to reach a moment of epiphany in which they pass along a key insight to the reader. Despite their seeming ordinariness, these heroes always turn out to be extraordinary, once we truly understand them. ...

What really makes Loman [from Death of a Salesman] a figure of awe is that he expected himself and his sons to be great, that he measured himself against such high standards that, by trying to meet them, he became exactly the Romantic hero that Arthur Miller was trying to avoid. He was one of the knights of the round table who failed to find the Holy Grail - but he was nobly searching for it nonetheless.

- from Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card, 1988, pg. 96