Of the Pyramid style _nothing_ passed over into the Doric. _Nothing_ connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.[275] Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old- fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque. III