Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer

The question posed in my title has been on the table for at least seventy years, and the history of the answers to date has been yes, no, maybe so. Some readers may be familiar with my own attempts to answer this long-unresolved question, most recently in Eliot's Dark Angel (1999).¹ I am now prepared to give a final answer (if not a final word) regarding the question of a personal and intellectual relationship between Eliot and Hulme in London between 1915 and 1917. In leading up to the answer, I must rehearse briefly the three periods of scholarly inquiry that have made a definitive resolution a crucial matter for both Eliot studies and literary history.

When T.S. Eliot reviewed the posthumous publication of T.E. Hulme's Speculations on the opening pages of the Criterion for April 1924, he declared the book a harbinger of the new classical age. "When Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917," Eliot recalled with the seeming familiarity of friendship, "he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language. In this volume he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own."² In succeeding years, Eliot was openly and repeatedly to champion Hulme's intellectual conservatism and embrace the "religious attitude" of his Humanism. Such was his enthusiasm that by the early 1930s Eliot's first critics naturally began to wonder if he had known and been influenced by Hulme in London during the war years. In the earliest comprehensive study of Eliot's critical theory in 1932, Ants Oras examined the likelihood of an early Eliot-Hulme relationship and stated inconclusively that "the belated publication of his [Hulme's] posthumous papers makes it questionable how far Eliot knew his ideas before bringing out his [Eliot's] first collection of essays."³ When Eliot went to Harvard for the 1932-33 academic year as Norton lecturer, he was interviewed by F.O. Matthiessen, who was also intrigued by their possible relationship. He might well have been, for Eliot was lecturing on Hulme to his undergraduate students and praising him in his Norton lectures for his classical view, his "remarkable poems" and his "aptitude for theology."⁴ Nonetheless, Eliot swiftly disabused Matthiessen of his critical queries about Hulme, and when Matthiessen's The Achievement of T.S. Eliot appeared in 1935 he stated authoritatively that "Eliot had not known Hulme personally, though he had heard much about him from Pound; and he had not read any of Hulme's essays before they were published, by which time Eliot's own theory had already matured."⁵ The similarity of their ideas, Matthiessen concluded, should be attributed to "an emerging general state of mind."

Matthiessen's book should have ended the matter, but when speculation persisted David Daiches was quick to cut it off again, stating in his Poetry and the Modern World (1940) that whether or not Eliot directly knew Hulme or his ideas before the publication of Speculations in 1924 is "a question not very easy to determine and not of any great importance."⁶ It was not until the late 1920s, Daiches asserted, that Eliot's criticism owed any of its essential features to Hulme. There was no further pursuit of the question for the next fourteen years, until Samuel Hynes felt obliged to write to Eliot about Hulme while preparing his edition of Hulme's Further Speculations (1955). Hynes was including in the volume Hulme's controversy with Bertrand Russell over pacifism in the Cambridge Magazine and had asked Russell about Eliot's knowledge of Hulme. In a letter of 23 March 1954, Eliot wrote in response to a series of questions from Hynes that he never met or corresponded with Hulme and that Russell's recollection that Vivien had introduced her husband to Hulme must be in error.⁷ Eliot was confident...