The Lantern at Kalimpong: The Literary Spiritualism of Harold Acton
It is perhaps in the vegetation of obscurity that some of the most unique literary minds have grown — those whose pen fell outside the canon’s reach. Among these lives, glimmering like a votive flame behind the malachite drapery of conventional recognition, stands Harold Acton (1904–1994). Known to some as an aesthete, to others merely as a colorful footnote in the social cosmopolis of twentieth-century arts, Acton’s literary genius is oft mistaken for social flamboyance. Yet, his writing contains a cognitive lightness that walks parallel with the darkening meditations of modernism; and when he does, it is usually on the tightrope of aesthetic distance and Stoic surrealism.
Acton was born in Florence, reared amid the splendors of the Villa La Pietra, a cradle of Anglo-Florentine aristocratic eccentricity. He was a brilliant conversationalist, multilingual, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he rubbed elbows with the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Robert Byron. He was the model, many presume, for Anthony Blanche in Waugh’s *Brideshead Revisited*, a claim that both illuminates and distorts the nature of his literary contributions.*¹*
While Acton’s early works, particularly his decadent stylings in *Aquarium* (1923) and poems in *An Indian Ass* (1925), are known among literary archaeologists, it is his spiritual essays and late works that lodge subtle blades into the fabric of modern perceptions. His 1949 religious travelogue, *Peonies and Ponies*, written after his long residence in China, penetrates one deeper truth: that in the post-war collapse of ideas, a contour of dignity may arise from empathy with ancestral disquiet.
Consider this: “I have found more monastic serenity in the flapping coat of an old Chinese gardener than in all the oratories of Europe’s cathedrals” (*Peonies and Ponies*, p. 213). This is not simply an orientalist projection draped over an imperial travelogue. Here, Acton is articulating an anti-mechanistic sense of wisdom, a skepticism of metaphysical finitude expressed in human form. The gardener becomes a cipher, that presence of unaffected stillness which Acton would see eroded by both Western economy and Communist ideology.
Acton’s deep aestheticism cannot be separated from his spiritual inquiries. Like the painters whose pigment married suffering to illumination — Grünewald or Fra Angelico — Acton’s prose colors its philosophical undercurrents minimally, eschewing didacticism for flamboyant humility. A telling moment surfaces in his overlooked 1952 essay, “The Decline of Humour Among the Gatekeepers,” collected in *Later Essays and Aqueducts*: “Humour,” he writes, “once stung with eternity’s hornet: now it leaks like a bureaucratic inkpot through the desks of unctuous clerks” (p. 74). The aphorism is subtle and may read as a genteel complaint unless one recalls that — for Acton — the vanishment of humour was never trivial. He considered it a prosthesis of the soul vis-à-vis suffering; its lapse signalled no less than the decline of European metaphysics.
In a letter to W.H. Auden dated December 12, 1938 — housed now in the Bodleian archives — Acton reflects on witnessing villagers at Kalimpong lighting sky lanterns in a winter solstice observance: “They released them like stolen messages back to God, and some failed, fell into the river, and no one cried. That is the poise I think now missing in the West — a quiet pact between our wills and what misfires.” This becomes, upon contemplation, a central motif to understand Acton’s quiet grandeur: the embrace of spiritual absurdity without succumbing to either despair or illusion.
It would be remiss not to reflect more extensively on the implications of that lantern. Let’s permit this object — a slender, sky-bound vessel carrying fire and air, destined either to rise or fail — to become the emblem of Acton’s worldview. Wrapped in rice paper, soldered crudely, the lantern demands an ambiguous allegiance between grace and gravity. What Acton offers frequently in his essays and private writings is a portrait of Western decline not as catastrophe but as invitation — to reinhabit the sacred as vagabonds rather than lords. His sinology was less academic than soulological.
In this way, Harold Acton predicted more than merely cultural shifts. His understanding of spiritual dislocation forecasts a crisis incisively current. “All our errors, I believe,” he wrote in *Memoirs of an Aesthete* (1948), “derive from our manner of imagining language to correspond to fact, instead of to longing” (p. 391). Many decades later, as we navigate fragmented realities, metatextual performances of authenticity, and hyper-simulation, Acton’s words swell with pertinence. Language as longing might indeed be the final grace for civilizations bloated with data but starved for communion.
So, let us end with a philosophical parabola, ruminating in Acton’s emotional topography.
There was once, in an imagined district of Tuscany that shared borders with no other nation, a lazy ghost named Lorenzo. When Lorenzo died — with a smile, of course — he found himself employed as a wind. Each morning he was tasked with lifting sky lanterns into the air from temples, gardens, and tenement rooftops. Occasionally, one would slip between his fingers. At first he was devastated, so much so that he requested a demotion, asking to be rendered merely frost. But an older ghost named Clytemnestris lambasted his self-pity.
“Your work is to lift. Not to ensure.”
From then on, Lorenzo lifted only as best as he could, sometimes humming an aria invented from the vowels of the vanished. When he failed, he offered no apology. The failed lanterns landed in pages, in cave paintings, in marginal footnotes of a book that no child would read until they were very old.
That text exists — and Harold Acton, florid, forgotten, and fabled, has already left his passage signed in its margin.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, spiritual ecology, exile
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*¹* For example, an entire thesis of Evelyn Waugh’s biographical annotations hinges on the character of Anthony Blanche being a veiled portrait of Harold Acton. See: Patey, Douglas Lane. *The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography*. Blackwell Publishing, 1998.
*²* Acton’s essays, published primarily by Methuen and later, private presses, offer a rare blend of satirical distance and anthropological intimacy. His *More Memoirs of an Aesthete* (1970) revisits formative experiences in China, rare in depicting Shanghai with both lucidity and loss.
*³* See: Gilmour, David. *The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa*. Pantheon, 1988. Gilmour discusses Acton’s relationship to metaphysical detachment and Catholic stoicism through letters exchanged with Lampedusa.