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.