The misleading dimensions of persons and lives

I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I am often out-topped by young fellow-queuers, sometimes even by girls. Many of the young men are enormous, six-and-a-half, even seven feet. Female six-footers stride along the pavements, elbowing elderly dwarves out of the way. When I was a young man living in Paris, one of my girlfriends was a six-footer, an American called Euphemia, whom the goggling French thought a gratte-ciel. But that was most unusual. My French girls tended to be around five foot two or three. Quite enough, as tall French females, in my experience, tend to be exceptionally tiresome. So, paradoxically, do English girls of five foot or less. Dorothy Wordsworth was an exception, being one of the most angelic figures in our literary history, until she got Alzheimer’s in the 1840s. She said she was five foot. She was delighted to meet the tiny Thomas de Quincy, just under four foot ten, because ‘he is the first person who has made me feel tall’.

What I want to know is this. Is the increase in average height, which is clearly a fact, being accompanied by an increase in intelligence? If so, it is a historic reversal. In the diaries of Edmund Wilson, which I have been reading, there is a passage on this point. Stephen Spender, a tall man, complains to him that for physiological reasons, relative intelligence declines with height. He said he had been lamenting this correlation with Aldous Huxley, who was a lanky giant and who argued that it was impossible for someone of his physique to have an absolutely first-class brain.