[In the following excerpt, Williamson argues that Felltham's Resolves drew upon Senecan style and wit, in both their pithiness and their gravity.]

Owen Feltham, who bears the clear imprint of Baconian imitation, speaks of style in his essay ‘Of Preaching’, which was added to his Resolves in 1628. His preferences in style are plainly Senecan:

A man can never speak too well, where he speaks not too obscure. Long and distended clauses, are both tedious to the ear, and difficult for their retaining. A sentence well couched, takes both the sense and the understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches, that are longer than the memory of man can fathom. … The weighty lines men find upon the stage, I am persuaded, have been the lures, to draw away the pulpit-followers.¹

Sententious but not obscure, such is the good style; apparently the pulpit had not been Senecan enough. Feltham feels that besides the advantage of action, the stage has the benefit of a ‘more compassed language: the dulcia sermonis, moulded into curious phrase’. Though speaking of oratory, Feltham echoes Seneca: ‘And this is Seneca's opinion: Fit words are better than fine ones. I like not those that are injudiciously made, but such as be expressively significant; that lead the mind to something besides the naked term.’² Again we encounter the central doctrine of expressiveness. But judgement is necessary for pregnant speech: as ‘Saint Augustine says, Tully was admired more for his tongue, than his mind’. And yet studied language is not vain, for ‘he that reads the Fathers, shall find them, as if written with a crisped pen’. Fit words do not preclude study, but rather enjoin it. ‘He prodigals a mine of excellency’, cautions Feltham, ‘that lavishes a terse oration to an aproned auditory.’

If Feltham's own style is a little ‘curled’, what he lavished on his audience may be observed by continuing the passage which draws upon Seneca:

And he that speaks thus, must not look to speak thus every day. A combed oration will cost both sweat, and the rubbing of the brain: and combed I wish it, not frizzled, nor curled. Divinity, should not lasciviate. Un-worm-wooded jests I like well; but they are fitter for the tavern, than the majesty of a temple.

Here is that violence of metaphor which stamped the character-writers and which was later criticized in Feltham. Otherwise, his ornament derives from Senecan antithesis, with some parallelism and a touch of alliteration to set it off; again he is like the character-writers.

If we have any doubt of Feltham's Senecanism, Thomas Randolph sets it at rest. His Conceited Peddler (1630), which W. C. Hazlitt calls ‘a shrewd satire on the follies and vices of the age’, makes much of ‘points’ and ‘a sovereign box of cerebrum’ produced by alchemy, ‘the fire being blown with the long-winded blast of a Ciceronian sentence, and the whole confection boiled from a pottle to a pint in the pipkin of Seneca’.³ Of course ‘points’ were the favourite form of Senecan wit, and the brevity of Seneca appeared intellectual by contrast with Ciceronian length. Randolph supports the conclusion that for his age the Senecan and the Ciceronian were the two poles between which style turned. His verses ‘To Master Feltham on his book of Resolves’ place Feltham accordingly—‘Nor doth the cinnamon-bark deserve less praise’—

I mean, the style being pure, and strong and round;
Not long, but pithy; being short-breath'd, but sound,
Such as the grave, acute, wise Seneca sings—
That best of tutors to the worst of kings.
Not long and empty; lofty, but not proud;
Subtle, but sweet; high, but without a cloud.
Well-settled, full of nerves—in brief 'tis such,
That in a little hath comprised much.(4)

Little could be added to this character of Senecan style, for such it appeared to that age; pithy, short-breathed, grave, acute, and nervous—such was Seneca and such Feltham. It is a style, as Bacon described it, ‘rather rounding into itself than spread and dilated’, potius versa quam fusa; antithetic, not fluent like the Ciceronian.

Notes

1. Resolves, First Century, xx. The potential defect of speaking too well is significant, but virtue lies in weighty or strong lines. Seneca's influence on drama had spread the cult of sententiae over the stage; cf. Jonson's ‘Preface to Sejanus’.

2. Ibid.; cf. Seneca, Ep. lix. 5-6.

3. Works, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875), i. 40, 44.

4. Ibid. ii. 575. Here the epithet ‘strong’ has the qualities that went with strong lines. This crisp antithetic phrasing is common in verse and prose alike from Jonson to Denham.