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PARTISAN REVIEW
And slower even than the arrows, the few sounds that come
Falling, as across water, from where farther off than the hills
The archers move in a different world in the same
Kingdom. Oh, can the noise of ilngels,
The beat and whirring between Thy kingdoms
Be even by such cropped feathers raised? Not though
With the wings of morning may I fly from Thee; for
it
is
Thy kingdom where (and the wind so still now)
I stand in pain; and, entered with pain as always,
Thy kingdom that on these erring shafts comes.
I think that Mr. Merwin is in many ways the most interesting
poet of his generation; he may very well turn out to be the best one.
In any event,
Green with Beasts
is a book for which I am truly grateful.
John Hollander
A CHARACTER WRECKED BY SUCCESS
THE ORGANIZATION MAN . By William H. Whyte. Jr. Simon &
Schuster. $5.00.
No one has yet improved upon the peroration delivered by
Max Weber against American culture. In the final paragraphs of
The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Weber writes of the
Protestant-read "American"-who has pursued salvation and won
wealth. Having created, through his energy, a world of abundance, the
moral athlete grows flabby and complacent
in
it. His prosperity, stripped
of its religious and ethical meaning, becomes a plush cage. "No one
knows who will live in this cage
in
the future, or whether at the end
of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or
there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,
mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self–
importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might
truly be said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this
nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved.''' No Catholic, no socialist, has launched a more prophetic
attack on the moral foundations of Western industrial culture than this
German liberal. Of course, a Catholic polemicist would find Weber's
