en the claim on him of a
woman, and that of a man; and his attitude towards women was in this
respect so distinctive as to merit some words of notice. It was large,
generous, and unconventional; but, for that very reason, it was not,
in the received sense of the word, chivalrous. Chivalry proceeds on
the assumption that women not only cannot, but should not, take care
of themselves in any active struggle with life; Mr. Browning had no
theoretical objection to a woman's taking care of herself. He saw no
reason why, if she was hit, she should not hit back again, or even
why, if she hit, she should not receive an answering blow. He responded
swiftly to every feminine appeal to his kindness or his protection,
whether arising from physical weakness or any other obvious cause of
helplessness or suffering; but the appeal in such cases lay first to his
humanity, and only in second order to his consideration of sex. He would
have had a man flogged who beat his wife; he would have had one flogged
who ill-used a child--or an animal: he was notedly opposed to any
sweeping principle or practice of vivisection. But he never quite
understood that the strongest women are weak, or at all events
vulnerable, in the very fact of their sex, through the minor traditions
and conventions with which society justly, indeed necessarily,
surrounds them. Still less did he understand those real, if impalpable,
differences between men and women which correspond to the difference
of position. He admitted the broad distinctions which have become
proverbial, and are therefore only a rough measure of the truth. He
could say on occasion: 'You ought to _be_ better; you are a woman; I ought
to _know_ better; I am a man.' But he had had too large an experience of
human nature to attach permanent weight to such generalizations; and
they found certainly no expression in his works. Scarcely an instance of
a conventional, or so-called man's woman, occurs in their whole range.
Excepting perhaps the speaker in 'A Woman's Last Word', 'Pompilia' and
'Mildred' are the nearest approach to it; and in both of these we
find qualities of imagination or thought which place them outside the
conventional type. He instinctively judged women, both morally and
intellectually, by the same standards as men; and when confronted by
some divergence of thought or feeling, which meant, in the woman's case,
neither quality nor defect in any strict sense of the word, but simply
a nature