PART IX.
THE TALL GIRL AND THE SMALL GIRL.
EXTREMES MEET AND KISS
“Often the cockloft is empty in those whom Nature has built many storeys high,” says quaint old Fuller.
“Long and lazy,” says the proverb.
“Divinely tall,” says Tennyson.
Now in thought go over the tall girls whom you have known. Perhaps they were not unlike the tall girls known to me.
Cicely—by herself called Thithily—is one of these. She has a little head atop of a long body, and when she laughs, which she does much, displays to view two rows of foolishly small teeth. Cicely laughs to keep herself from crying, for she has a very hard time of it.
Poor?
No. She has everything that money can buy, but lacks a thing that money cannot buy.
Muriel is the poor long girl known to me.
Muriel’s wail is, There is so much of me to dress.
When last I saw Muriel, her boots were down at heel, and to shamefacedness she added—shamefootedness.
Dearest to me of long girls is one Dorothy, big and beautiful and kind, knowing some things—not many—and wanting to know more.
Said Dorothy one day—
“Is there not such a word as ‘magnanimosity’ for ‘kindness’?”
It was hard to have to tell her that there was not, and that, if ever such a word as “magnanimosity” shall be, it will certainly not be a word for “kindness.”
Have you noticed that a big girl mostly has a small girl for her friend, and vice versâ? Shakespeare, who noticed all things, noticed that. With Helena he puts Hermia, and with Rosalind Celia.
The tall girls of prose-fiction are numerous. For A there is Blackmore’s Annie, who “never tried to look away when honest people gazed at her.” For B there is Thackeray’s Beatrix, and there is one for every other letter in the alphabet.
The “towering big” girl—to put the matter Hibernically—had a great vogue a few years ago as the heroine of Trilby, but, on the whole, the small girl has been more singled out for loving treatment by novelists than the tall girl. Dickens had a known preference for her, and his “little Nell” has eclipsed all big Nells. In the description of one Ruth, too, it may be noticed that he uses with loving iteration the word “little”—“pleasant little Ruth! cheerful, tidy, bustling, quiet little Ruth!”
In fiction subsequent to that of Dickens there is a Mary described thus—“a little dumpty body, with a yellow face and a red nose, the smile of an angel, and a heart full of many little secrets of other people’s, and of one great one of her own, which is no business of any man’s.”
A Tall Story
All readers of Kingsley’s Two Years Ago will remember that Mary.
The poets no less than the prose-writers have busied themselves with the small girl. The mere word Duchess to most people calls up a picture of stateliness, yet Browning describes a duchess as follows:—
“She was the smallest lady alive.”
In these days of tall girls small girls are apt to fret. There is one known to me whose case is pitifuller than that of the little fir-tree in Andersen.
That little fir-tree, you will remember, thought of nothing so much as growing. The children sitting beside it would often exclaim, “How pretty and little it is!” It could not bear to hear that, says Andersen.
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make men better be
Ben Jonson
The case of the little girl known to me is just by so much sadder than that of the little fir-tree that she knows that her growing days are over. When last I saw her she was trying to give length to herself by a long tail to her dress, but the world was not deluded thus, and measured her, as naturalists measure the mouse, “not including the tail.”
Happily a major number of small girls still carry a high heart, knowing that maids, as well as men, may be “little, very little, but not insignificant.”
Those words are Sir Walter Scott’s in reference to Thomas Moore, whose pseudonym, it may be remembered, was at one time Thomas Little.
This is perhaps the place in which to say a word about the persons whose littleness is bound up with their fame. One of the greatest generals of all time had for his best known soubriquet “the little corporal.” Omit the “little” in that case, and the appellation is robbed of all that gives piquancy to it.
How much there may be in the mere word “little” is shown in the following—true—story.
A living sculptor of note, a foreigner residing in London, made a tender group composed of a mother and her child. The mother was counting the baby’s toes, and beneath the group was carved a legend which the artist conceived to embody a familiar nursery rhyme. The legend ran, “One pig went to market.”
Ah, von leettle peeg—oui, oui!
“Sir, sir!” remonstrated an Irishwoman, to whose inspection the group was subjected, “you’ve made a terrible omission. You’ve left out ‘little.’ No human mother would sing to her babe, ‘One pig went to market.’”
The foreign sculptor beat his breast.
The ironical use of big for small and small for big is a thing of old custom. Thus one of the biggest English Johns who ever lived was known to his contemporaries, and is still known to those who cherish his memory, as Little John, and it is by a similar pleasantry, according to a learned writer, that Maria, who in Shakespeare’s play of Twelfth Night is represented as a little woman, is called by Viola “Olivia’s giant,” and that Sir Toby says to her “Good-night, Penthesilea,” meaning by Penthesilea amazon, if his meaning was not merely (and to me this seems to be the more likely thing) to twit the little woman by giving her a long name.
Indubitably there is a beauty in tall stature. On the other hand the case of small girls versus tall girls is in one agreeable respect analogous to that of ants versus elephants. Though an ant is not the smallest creature that is, it looks very small beside an elephant; yet it has long been voted mentally superior to the elephant; in fact, Coleridge was wont to speak of the ant as the most “intellectual” of animals. That may be so, or may not be so; it is established fact, however, that the majority of women who have distinguished themselves by their intellectuality have been little women. This is true of the poetesses, from Sappho to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Among women-writers of imaginative prose it would be easy, but would be invidious, to name living ones. Of the great dead it is enough to name Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, both of them little women.
Among the many women who have distinguished themselves as rulers Queen Elizabeth made good in high dignity what she lacked in high stature, and the same thing is true of the queen who to-day occupies the throne of England.
TWO GREAT LITTLE QUEENS
To give one more instance of the great in the little, it was a little woman who worked the prison reforms which make the name of Elizabeth Fry a deathless one. The list of great little women is indeed very long.
A word must be said here in reference to a charge much levelled at small persons, especially small girls and women. They have been said to be unduly self-assertive, and their sisters have been praised for their superior meekness. It is not always, but it is sometimes, the case of the high holly branches and the low. The high holly branches put out no prickles, because, as the botanists explain, they do not need them. Above a certain height there is no danger of attack.
In fairness to tall girls it must be allowed that they are sometimes attacked. Said a little Irishman to a big English girl whom he met under the stars one summer night—
“I’m wantin’ to light me pipe, miss. Will ye kindly hand me down a star?”
The nonplussed English girl was silent, and Pat the saucy went on his way unpunished.
The O’Prometheus and his hollow tube
Gentleness and bigness often go together, but lest any long Meg who may chance to read this paper lay the too-flattering unction to her soul that there was never shrew that was bigger than a mouse, be it here set down that the famous Long Meg of Westminster was a dreaded virago. There is also no reason to believe that the shrew of Shakespeare’s comedy—the lady ironically styled “the kindest Kate”—was of small body dimensions.
It may be allowed, however, that vehemence is more often a distinguishing mark of little persons than of big ones. Similarly, little persons are, as a rule, more prone to indulge in a scornful vein, and here there shall be a thing whispered to the small girl. The tall are rarely so contemptuous to the small as the small are to the—smaller. This appears to have been so from of old. Thus it was, according to an old Greek fable, the ant that said of the mite when the beasts—including the elephant and the whale—were summoned before Jupiter, that she—the mite—was so small as to be beneath notice. This objection—coming from the ant—must have surprised the elephant and the whale.
To conclude. Since (as the proverb has it) they are not all big men who reap the harvest, and since, equally, they are not all small men who do this, the thing of main importance would appear to be not a man’s physical height; and, as is the case with men in this matter, so is, it may safely be assumed, the case with the daughters of men.
[THE END.]