Classicism . . . was a school that had devised a set of arbitrary, concretely
detailed rules purporting to represent the final and absolute criteria of
esthetic value. In literature, these rules consisted of specific edicts,
loosely derived from the Greek (and French) tragedies, which prescribed every
formal aspect of a play (such as the unity of time, place and action) down to
the number of acts and the number of verses permitted to a character in every
act. Some of that stuff was based on Aristotle’s esthetics and can serve as an
example of what happens when concrete-bound mentalities, seeking to by-pass the
responsibility of thought, attempt to transform abstract principles into
concrete prescriptions and to replace creation with imitation. (For an example
of Classicism that survived well into the twentieth century, I refer you to the
architectural dogmas represented by Howard Roark’s antagonists in
The Fountainhead.
Even though the Classicists had no answer to why their rules were to be
accepted as valid (except the usual appeal to tradition, to scholarship and to
the prestige of antiquity), this school was regarded as the representative of
reason.(!)