It’s often the little men who make it big — or, some would say, need to make it big, adding (more unkindly), to feel good about themselves. Nicolas Sarkozy’s not-so-secret anxieties about who gets to stand close to him in public has less to do with security, it seems, than with appearance. Self-image is all in the head: at five-foot five, the French president minds quite a bit that he is shorter than the French emperor. In the popular mind, Napoleon embodies the inverse relation that many assume between height and ambition, stature and status — erroneously, it appears, for Napoleon was actually 5 ft 6 inches tall. But the image of him as ambitious but short, or ambitious because short, endures. And from depictions of him by painters, one would have thought that horses and mountains were invented in order to make the little conqueror look, and feel, big.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that it was around Napoleon’s time that a certain way of thinking about the relationship between human beings and everything that is larger and more powerful than them was being theorized in the arts in the name of the ‘sublime’. Everything that overwhelmed or terrified sensitive human beings, but in a thrilling sort of way, was supposed to be sublime — like mountains, monarchs, god or great art. And the sublime had the peculiar capacity to make one feel big as well as small, elevated as well as humiliated. Looking at the Mont Blanc shrouded in mist, it was difficult to decide whether one partook of its sublimity or was overpowered by it. It all depended on how one made one’s imagination work, or whether one enjoyed being made to feel better or worse about oneself.
This was how the sublime kept Romantic artists literally on their toes. And some of the greatest of them were very short indeed — Beethoven was less than 5 ft 4 in, and Keats just 5 ft. Both were vehement practitioners of the sublime, and both could not decide whether they liked or disliked people who were more powerful than they were. Once, when Keats was praised as “quite the little poet”, he protested that it was like calling Napoleon “quite the little soldier”. He added, “You see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord.” He was, of course, thinking about the taller, nobler and sexier Byron (never mind the clubfoot — women love imperfections). It was also Keats who described the achievements of predecessors like Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth as a towering cliff that made him feel puny if he stood at its feet and bigger than everybody else if he stood on top of it. That was the trouble with wanting to be among the English poets.
In the century after Keats, would Woody Allen be Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman Dustin Hoffman, and Robi Ghosh Robi Ghosh, if they stood as tall as Gregory Peck? And would Manhattan be the film it is if Diane Keaton were shorter than Mr Allen? “Your self-esteem is a notch below Kafka’s,” Mr Allen points out to Ms Keaton in the film. But could one have imagined that Kafka — who had mastered the art of feeling wretched about oneself — was actually 6 ft tall?
