Evidence Produced to Disprove Napoleon’s Theory That Short Men Are the
More Intellectual.
What is the height of genius? How do its physical inches correspond with
its altitude of mind and soul? These questions are a subject of curious
inquiry with the Boston _Herald_.
Napoleon the Great, a short man, surrounded himself with a staff of
short men. He did not care to look like a pygmy among his subordinates.
Doubtless vanity contributed to his preference for few inches. He said
of General Kléber: “He has all the qualities and defects of a tall man.”
Napoleon would not only have agreed with Lombroso that great men are
short men, but he went further than that; he altered the stature of
Frederick the great, of Alexander, of Cæsar, to suit himself. He
always insisted that they were short men, but the chroniclers of their
times tell us otherwise.
The chroniclers of Napoleon’s time seem to have been struck by his own
fancy, for they made him as short as they conveniently could. His old
friend Bourrienne wrote Napoleon’s height as five feet two inches.
Constant put it at five feet one inch. But, after all, these were old
French measures.
Captain Maitland’s testimony is more to the point. It was to Captain
Maitland that Napoleon surrendered on board the Bellerophon. Maitland
measured him and recorded the fallen conqueror’s height as five feet
seven inches, English. That, by the way, is half an inch more than the
stature of Lord Roberts.
The Test of Figures.
But the Napoleonic theory does not bear the test of figures.
Intellectual power in its varied manifestations is not found at its
utmost strength in small men only. It takes men as it finds them—tall
and short, thin and plump—and it seems to rather like height.
Thackeray was six feet four inches. So was Fielding. Scott, Walt
Whitman, and Tennyson were six-footers. Goethe, the elder Dumas,
Robert Burns, and Longfellow were five feet ten inches. J. M. Barrie
is only five feet five inches, and Kipling only five feet six inches.
Edwin A. Abbey has the same height as Barrie; so has Alma-Tadema.
Lord Curzon is six feet one inch, George Westinghouse is over six feet
two inches, Andrew Carnegie is five feet four and a half inches,
President Roosevelt is five feet nine inches. Mr. Gladstone was five
feet nine inches. Sir Henry Irving was an inch taller.
Edmund Burke and Oliver Cromwell were five feet ten and a half inches,
which, by the way, is the height of the present Prime Minister of
England, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Wellington was half an inch
taller than Napoleon.
That trio of great admirals—Nelson, Blake, and Sydney Smith—were a
little under five feet six inches. Bismarck was a tall man, but not so
tall as George Washington, who was six feet three inches. Sargent, the
great painter, is six feet; Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Ruskin were
six-footers.
Disraeli and Dickens were five feet nine inches, which is also the
stature of Sir William Crookes. Sir Oliver Lodge is six feet three
inches, Marconi five feet ten and a half inches.
Emerson, Hans Andersen, Wordsworth, Bunyan, Audubon, Corot, Moltke,
Millet, Gounod, Lord Clive, and Lord Brougham were tall men. So were
Humboldt and Helmholtz. Lord Kelvin is five feet seven inches, Lord
Reay six feet two inches. Conan Doyle is six feet one inch, Anthony
Hope three inches shorter. All these figures give the stature of the
men in their boots.
King Edward is five feet eight and a half inches, the Kaiser just an
inch shorter. The Mikado is five feet six inches, the King of Italy
five feet two inches. The Czar’s height is the same as the Kaiser’s.
Leopold, King of the Belgians, is six feet five inches.
Americans Taller Than Englishmen.
Peter the Great was six feet eight and a half Inches. Abraham Lincoln
was just under six feet two inches, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard
Burton six feet. Alfred de Musset, Froude, Puvis de Chavannes,
Poussin, Lessing. Schiller, Lamartine, and Sterne were tall men. W. S.
Gilbert is over six feet.
It would be possible to lengthen this list to the point of
tediousness. But the more the subject is examined, the farther away we
get from the Napoleonic theory. Nature has a pretty wide range in
these matters, and she makes the most of it.
When it comes to averages, figures prepared by the anthropometric
committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
indicate that the average stature of the male adults of England is
five feet seven inches and seven-eighths, although the professional
and commercial classes show “a mean height of from two to three inches
above this, and the laboring classes an inch or two below.” The Scotch
and Irish are a little taller, and the Welsh a little shorter than the
English.
The average for the United States is said to be taller than the
English—a fact which implies neither genius nor the lack of it.