On Short Legs And Long Legs

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Title:     On Short Legs And Long Legs
Author: A. G. Gardiner [More Titles by Gardiner]

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.

[The end]
A. G. Gardiner's essay: On Short Legs And Long Legs

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