THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
quite definitively to have found it, but Bengal art has found its way at once at the first step, by a sort of immediate in-tuition.
Partly, this is because the new litera-ture began in the period of foreign infl-uence and of an indecisive groping, while art in India was quite silent,— except for the preposterous Ravi Varma interlude which was doomed to sterility by its ab-surdly barren incompetence,—began in a moment of self-recovery and could pro- fit by a clearer possibility of light. But besides, plastic art is in itself by its very limitation, by the narrower and intense range of its forms and motives, often more decisively indicative than the more fluid and variable turns of literary thought and expression. Now the whole power of the Bengal artists springs from their deliberate choice of the spirit and hidden meaning in things rather than their form and surface meaning as the object to be expressed. It is intuitive
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