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It is not growing like a tree.… The poet wrote of Man, and Man as the ultimate standard of all size need not, outside a company of Footguards, regard I the trivial vacillation of his inches. In other manifestations, Size is a matter of moment. Look at a Little Pyramid; a Big Pyramid has to fight hard enough for intelligent recognition, but those little pyramids that the Pharaonic builders did not hesitate to scatter round and about are surely silly toys beyond belief. And imagine a little Empire State Building, bereft of the size and vista that give some sort of status, I suppose, to the actual pile; the thought horrifies. Imagine a little St. Peter’s, such as can in fact be seen somewhere in Canada, lacking altogether that superhuman, super-personal, immensity that in Rome at once conditions the mind to all measure of other-worldly emotion. Size.
1 Julian Huxley, ‘The Size of Living Things’, in his Man in the Modern World, London, 1947.
2 The Pantheon is perhaps the first major monument to be composed entirely as an interior’.—J. B. Ward-Perkins in Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXIII, 1947, 169.
3 The Ruins of Balbec otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria, London, 1757.
4 Michael Grant, The World of Rome, London, 1960, p. 290.
