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4 California Outdoors and In [[image]] The Late Wilson Mizner WILSON MIZNER By GOUVERNEUR MORRIS To me, now that Wilson Mizner has gone out of it, the world is not as rich as it was; not so honest and by no means so brave. And there are thousands who feel just as I do. Wherever individuality, power, courage and the ability to think untrammelled [[untrammeled]] thoughts are admired, Wilson Mizner will be mourned. He believed that in this country, at least, there is equality of opportunity for all. But he had no belief in equality by out-cry and statute. He was an individualist of rich gold, twenty-four carat fine. For mass thought, mass opinion and mass judgement, he had a contempt, which, now that he is dead, will perhaps never again be adequately expressed in words. He hated the things that all decent individualists hate; sham, hypocrisy and moral cowardice. But he was able to express these hates with a crushing evenness of temper and a hugeness of jocosity which had never been surpassed, nor has the loud beauty and booming quality of the voice in which he expressed them been surpassed, nor the contrition which he felt when he had struck too hard and wounded too cruelly. It is foolish to say that Keats would have surpassed Shakespeare if he had lived. He might or he might not. But it is not in the least foolish to say the Wilson Mizner would have been a very great writer if he had chosen to write. He could not, to save his soul, say the most ordinary thing in the world in an ordinary way. Throughout the vastness of his vocabulary be hunted and found, always with unerring swiftness, the right word. Of all the men that I have known and of all the writers that I have read, he alone had the ability to paint definitively with words. For me and for some others he once made with words a quick portrait, colored to perfection, of a certain man, a gambler. And when he had laid on the last telling, necessary stroke, he asked us to guess the man's name. None of us had ever known the man or heard of him but three of us at once guessed, "Jack Frost," and that indeed was the man's name. It is not possible to project my old friend in a short article. Boswell is dead, too, and so it is doubtful if he will ever be adequately projected in a long biography. It is a pity. A front row seat at the first meeting between Wilson Mizner and Doctor Johnson, in the Elysian Fields, would be worth all the money that a man ever hoped to have. How they will love each other, and how gloriously each of the giants will try to roar the other down! People who knew him will not think me a foolish hero-worshiper when I say that my money would be on the American. A wonderful thing has gone out of my life and out of the lives of many others. Who is there left with the heart and the slight-of-tongue to make a man feel that until the moment of his arrival, the gathering was short of perfect? Sic transit! Already he is legend. Gouverneur Morris
