The Grove Symposium

His study provides a striking parallel between the vision of the cyclic rise and fall of cultures found in The Master of the Mill and Fruits of the Earth. [...] Employing the commonplace, the natural, the simple as materials, it seeks always to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual; whereas realism finds its values in the actual, and naturalism in the scientific laws which undergrid the actual, (pp. [...] Where the romanticist transcends the immediate to find the ideal, and the naturalist plumbs the actual to find the scientific laws which control its actions, the realist centers his attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable conse- quence. [...] It tends to differ from realism, not in its attempt to be accurate in the portrayal of its materials but in the selection and organization of those materials, selecting not the commonplace but the representative and so arranging the materials that the structure of the novel reveals the pattern of ideas—in this case, scientific theory—which forms the author's view of the nature of experience. [...] Treating family life from the points of view of the matriarch and the child, "The Weatherhead Fortunes" and "Jane Atkinson" supply a miss- ing fragment from Grove's examination of the disintegration of the family—indeed of the generational conflict which occupies Grove's mind to the writing of The Master of the Mill.