“Development” and Browning's Philosophy of Inadequacy

Robert Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. On the same day Asolando: Fancies and Facts was published in London. During this centennial year I should like to look at the poet's last publication and take note of his valedictory remarks particularly as they touch on his well-known “philosophy of the imperfect,” which I believe can be better understood as a philosophy of inadequacy. To that end I shall focus on the poem “Development,” which gives a general idea of what Browning had to say not only in Asolando but in much of his earlier work as well.

Performing Suffering: From Dickens to David

“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (Forster 1: 25 and Dickens 218). Charles Dickens's description of the anguish of his childhood is wreathed in paradoxes the author savors but does not acknowledge. Like his scandalous successor Oscar Wilde, Dickens luxuriates in the spectacle of his own martyrdom. His commendation “exquisitely” turns a lament into a boast, undermining the sincerity that assures us his suffering has no language. Yet despite their half-concealed pleasure at his own pain, these sentences pleased Dickens so much that, after writing them to John Forster in his secret confession of his childhood humiliation, he gave them to his abused, beloved David Copperfield and thereby to the world. David, however, subdues the pride in emotional virtuosity his creator could not suppress.

The Word's Dispersion: Two Letters and a Parchment in Browning's Poetry

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.