And if his mother, who was of clerical stock,
had not died about the same time, it is more than likely
that she would have persuaded him to the bar. With his
parents the obligation to be anything in particular seemed
to Kendal to have been removed, however, and he followed
his inclination in the matter instead, which made him an
artist. He would have found life too interesting to
confine his observation of it within the scope of any
profession, but of course he could have chosen none which
presents it with greater fascination. To speak quite
baldly about him, his intelligence and his sympathies
had a wider range than is represented by any one power
of expression, even the catholic brush. He had the
analytical turn of the age, though it had been denied
him to demonstrate what he saw except through an art
which is synthetic. With a more comprehensive conception
of modern tendencies and a subtler descriptive vocabulary,
Kendal might have divided his allegiance between Lucien
and the magazines, and ended a light-handed fiction-maker
of the more refined order of realists. As it was, he made
his studies for his own pleasure, and if the people he
met ministered to him further than they knew, nothing
came of it more than that.
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