A day or two ago a soldier, returned from the front, was loudly inveighing
in a railway carriage against the bumptiousness and harshness of the
captain under whom he had served. "Let me git 'im over 'ere," he said, "and
I'll lay 'im out--see if I don't. I've 'ad enough of 'is bullyin'. It ain't
even as if 'e was a decent figure of a man. 'E don't stand more'n
five-feet-two. I could knock 'im out with one 'and, and I'd 'ave done it
before now only you mustn't out there. If you did you'd get a pound o' lead
pumped into you."
Now, I dare say little five-feet-two deserved all that was said of him, and
all he will get by way of punishment; but the point about the remark that
interests me is the contempt it revealed for the man of small stature.
There's no doubt that a little man starts with a grievance, with an
aggravating sense of an inferiority that has nothing to do with his real
merits. I know the feeling. For myself, I am just the right height--no
more, no less. I am five-feet-nine-and-a-half, and I wouldn't be a shade
different either way. I dare say that is the general experience. Every one
feels that his own is really the ideal standard. It is so in most things.
Aristotle said that a man ought to marry at thirty-eight. I think he said
it because he himself married at thirty-eight. Now, I married at
twenty-three, and my opinion is that the right age at which to get
married--if you are of the marrying sort--is twenty-three. In short,
whatever we do or whatever we are, we have a deep-rooted conviction that we
are "it." And it is well that it should be so. Without this innocent
self-satisfaction there would be a lot more misery in the world.
But though I am the perfect height of five-feet-nine-and-a-half, I always
feel depressed and out-classed in the presence of a man, say of
six-feet-two. He may be an ass, but still I have to look up to him in a
physical sense, and the mere act of looking up seems to endow him with a
moral advantage. I feel a grievance at the outrageous length of the fellow,
and find I want to make him fully understand that though I am only
five-feet-nine-and-a-half in stature, my intellectual measurement is about
ten feet, and that I am looking down on him much more than he is looking
down on me.
It is this irksome self-consciousness that is the permanent affliction of
the physically small man. Indeed, it is the affliction of any one who has
any physical peculiarity--a hare-lip, for example. Byron raged all his life
against his club-foot, and doubtless that malformation was largely the
cause of his savage contempt for a world that went about on two
well-matched feet. I am sure that if I had a strawberry mark on the face I
should never think about anything else. If I talked to any one I should
find him addressing his words to my strawberry mark. I should feel that he
was deliberately and offensively dwelling on my disfigurement, saying to
himself how glad he was he hadn't a strawberry mark and what a miserable
chap I must be with such an article. He would not be doing anything of the
sort, of course. He would probably be doing his best to keep his eyes off
the strawberry mark. But I shouldn't think so, for I should be in that
unhealthy condition of mind in which the whole world would seem to revolve
around my strawberry mark.
And so with the small man. He lives in perpetual consciousness that the
world is talking over his head, not because there is less sense in his head
than in other heads, but simply because his legs are shorter than the
popular size of legs. He is either overlooked altogether, or he is looked
down upon, and in either case he is miserable. Occasionally his shortage
lays him open to public ridicule. A barrister whom I knew--a man with a
large head, a fair-sized body, and legs not worth mentioning--once rose to
address a judge before whom he had not hitherto appeared. He had hardly
opened his mouth when the judge remarked severely: "It is usual for counsel
to stand in addressing the Court." "My lord," said the barrister, "I am
standing."
Now can you imagine an agony more bitter than that to a sensitive man? I
daresay he lost his case, for he must certainly have lost his head. You
cannot cross-examine a witness effectively when you are thinking all the
time about your miserable legs. And even if he won his case it probably
gave him no comfort, for he would feel that the jury had given their
verdict out of pity for the "little 'un." It is this self-consciousness
that is the cause of that assertiveness and vanity that are often
characteristic of the little man. He is probably not more assertive or more
vain than the general run of us, but we can keep those defects dark, so to
speak. He, on the other hand, has to go through life on tip-toe, carrying
his head as high as his neck will lift it, and saying, as it were: "Hi! you
long-legged fellows, don't forget me!" And this very reasonable anxiety to
have "a place in the sun" gives him the appearance of being aggressive and
vain. He is only trying to get level with the long-legged people, just as
the short-sighted man tries to get level with the long-sighted man by
wearing spectacles.
The discomfort of the very tall man is less humiliating than that of the
small man, but it is also very real. He is just as much removed from
contact with the normal world, and he has the added disadvantage of being
horribly conspicuous. He can never forget himself, for all heads look up at
him as he passes. He doesn't fit any doorway; he can't buy ready-made
clothes; if he sleeps in a strange bed he has to leave his feet outside;
and in the railway carriage or a bus he has to tie his legs into
uncomfortable knots to keep them out of the way. In short, he finds himself
a nuisance in a world made for people of five-feet-nine-and-a-half. But he
has one advantage over the small man. He does not have to ask for notice.
The result is that while the little man often seems vain and pushful, the
giant usually is very tame, and modest, and unobtrusive. The little man
wants to be seen: the giant wants not to be seen.
And so it comes about that our virtues and our failings have more to do
with the length of our legs than we think.