RELATIONS OF A MAN’S STATURE AND GENIUS.
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.