know. One might almost think that the author took pride in suggesting that he had sprung out of absolute nothingness … and from the viewpoint of the social apex, he might just as well. We become aware of him for the first time as a boy of nine, living with an uncle in the London district of Poplar, adjacent to the great docks and the region particularly favored by Chinamen and all sorts of foreigners. Like other children of that picturesque but morally indifferent region, he was free of the streets, and he used his freedom to the ulmost, though in a manner that would probably have aroused the scorn even of his natural playmates. Where they scoffed and jeered and hated he found friendship and solace and a way to wisdom beyond his years and condition. "Low" as was his own class, judged by the accepted social gauge, there were others still lower, and to these, the unregistered and uncherished classes comprising the criminal and the prostitute, the informer and his victim, the Chink and the oriental flotsam of the docks, his interest and his sympathy went out from the first. Without ever becoming more than a visitor in their strangely self sufficient world, he learned to know its drab byways and suspicious glamours, its occasions of resplendent tragedy.

The uncle of little Tommy, "the boy with the sharp nose," had been an innkeeper and was a gardener when brought on the scene in The Wind and the Rain. He was a wise man in his humble way, holding that God might be worshiped as well in the streets or in one's bedroom as in the churches. From him and his chums at "The Barge Aground" must have come some of the gentle and tolerant philosophy that runs like a soothing, harmonious undercurrent beneath all the soul stirring stories later told by his nephew. Among those chums was the "housekeeper," or lockup guard, of the local police station; when this man began to talk about the outlandish doings in the Causeway, where centers the Chinatown of London, then little Tommy became so "entrapped" that, as he tells us now, "he could recount some of the stories to this day, word for word, pause for pause." How many of those stories are to be found in Limebouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights we do not know, but we may guess.

The boy's dearest friend during those early years, however, was an old Chinaman, named Quong Lee in The Wind and the Rain, whose shop he visited clandestinely and ecstatically, receiving from him bits of ginger, monosyllabic remarks and the incipiency of a mystic dream of beauty that was to pursue him through many purgatorial years, until at last it half goaded him and half guided him into the comparative heaven of artistic self-realization. "In that shop," writes Mr. Burke, "I knew what some people seek in church and others seek in taverns." There, too, he learned "all the beauty and all the evil of the heart of Asia; its cruelty, its grace and its wisdom."

What would have happened if the Lady of the Big House where the uncle worked as gardener had not begun to "take an interest" in little Tommy, with his "oo's," his "not 'alf's," his dropped "aitches," his Bible "tex" learned by rote, and his shy dreams of something ineffable, who can tell? As it was that interest tore him out of the kindly company of "The Barge Aground" and from the mystically inspiring presence of Quong Lee, giving him instead four years of unspeakable humiliation, oppression, and spiritual mortification in an orphange where, under the guise of Christian Charity, he was brought nearer to hell than he had ever come while still haunting the lanes and back alleys and dark arches of Limehouse. Thence he emerged on the edge of adolescence, a little seared of soul, full of terrifying knowledge, and yet as innocent of heart as any child cradled in Mayfair. His uncle was dead. He was absolutely alone in the world, a queer, uncouth boy of fourteen, and he was held lucky to get a pitifully humble place among the nameless and unnumbered white collar multitudes serving as a foundation for that pyramid of wealth and prosperous enterprise known to all the rest of the world as the City. And once more that boy, so peculiarly immune to poisons that would have killed or eternally warped most other striplings, had to spend years in a purgatory bordering on hell itself… four endlessly long years during which, "night after night, he went hungry to bed, actively hungry."

Yet it was during those very years that he began to study London as, before him, under conditions not very dissimilar, it had been studied by the young Dickens and the young Machen—with a passionate love, and an eye for beauty, and a sense for half-hidden mysteries that by and by were to make their possessor one of the most convincing painters of the high lights and dark shadows, the glamour and glory and shame, of what is probably the world's most marvelous city. At seven o'clock he was free of the streets, as he had been years before, and night after night he tramped innumerable miles in "muzzy exaltation," drugging himself with the infinitely variable atmosphere of those streets, and returning at last to his dreary den "hot and dazed." Each night he carried back with him a little parcel of pictures:

The haze of a fried-fish bar, The tinkle of an organ hidden in a back street. A lamp in an alley giving just light enough to make darkness horrible. The reek and murk of a public house. The massed lights of factories hung, as it were, from the sky. The gleam and gush of drapers' windows. Voices mourning or crying from unseen points. Street corner groupings carven out of shadow. Strange life moving behind curtained windows or half-open doors.

It was that period, too, which brought his discovery of reading and literature and poetry. A paper picked up by chance in a cheap coffee shop flung open doors which until then had been not only closed but unsuspected. Starved already, he stinted himself still further to buy low priced editions of the classic poets. The possibilities of the circulating libraries also became revealed to him, and he read in a fever, omnivorously, but with small realization and scant returns. All he got out of it was a vague desire to write… something. More light did not come until he had found what was to be a lifelong love, equalling what he left for the Causeway and the great city itself. Music once encountered in its higher manifestations, became part of himself as much as the underworld of his childhood and the dream of the ineffable started by old Quong Lee's shop. Though he was incapable of musical expression himself, the music that he drank in with open ears and heart seemed to take firm lodging in his mind and gradually come forth again as a curiously stirring melody of words.

He began to write. In fact from the first moment of his authorial start, he was writing all the time, and in conditions that to the overwhelming majority of mankind would have seemed too hideously hopeless for sustained effort of any kind. He wrote reams, on paper when he could get it, otherwise on backs of envelopes, on scraps of wrapping, on anything. And always he wrote with one purpose, one scene in his mind. He wanted to express one moment in a London street… the moment when he stood looking into Quong Lee's shop and the old Chinaman for the first time beckoned him to come in. That moment was to him what conversion is to the pious believer. And so, at sixteen, he sold his first story for a fabulous guinea and thought himself made… only to find that he had not yet made a real start. It was this writing, however, such as it was, that finally took him out of the City as a rebel to its discipline and flung him back into the streets, a starving, homeless waif more than ever. Then, after a relatively happy period within the grotesquely joyous world of the music halls, he returned briefly to the world of his beginnings, to the Causeway and Quong Lee. It was after meeting the latter once more, a dishonored but philosophic outcast being deported at the completion of his punishment for having conducted an opium den of more than customary disrepute, that young Thomas Burke saw the light fully for the first time, and the stories began to appear which quickly made him famous. It was as if the dream planted in his soul by the old Chinaman could not assume tangible shape until Quong Lee himself had vanished out of the picture for ever. Then the moment of greatest joy merged with that of keenest sorrow, and a writer was born.

The rest of Mr. Burke's story need not be told. LimehouseNights made him. The filming of the first story in that collection under the title of Broken Blossoms spread his name across the globe. Since then he has produced many volumes, all eminently readable and worth reading. But the ones that really count are those mentioned in the beginning of this article. He has written poetry, but his verse does not rise to the high level of his prose. His studies of the London scene, though excellent, do not compare in significance with his stories or novels. The first of the novels, Twinkletoes, though good as everything he has written, may also be left aside as being in essence an expanded short story. It suggests that its author had not yet found his bearings in that less concentrated medium. The Wind and The Rain, on the other hand, and still more his latest work, The Sun in Splendour, though the finest, are autobiographical to be sure, yet they are true novels, clearly indicative of a new growth, taking him beyond the highly specialized themes that both carry and limit his short stories.

What is it that catches and holds and charms us in these stories? The pleasingly shocking novelty of the general atmosphere first of all, I suppose. But the appeal of mere novelty wanes with familiarity, and I have read those vibrant tales of Mr. Burke's earlier volumes several times without any slackening of interest. The first startled impression is gone forever. Their subtler appeal remains undiminished. This appeal must touch something that lurks very deep down in my soul. They are full of flamboyant colors, of course … colors as tempting and intimidating as those of a tropical jungle … colors that glow with the fierceness of living flames when set against the grey background of a modern slum. The life painted with the magic of those colors is remarkably primitive, and for this reason more directly expressive than that to which our daily well regulated existences have accustomed us. Passions and desires otherwise carefully suppressed are there flaunted openly and as openly indulged. The savage in us may be gloating over those stories, but perhaps he is also assuaged and rendered harmless by them. Revenge, of which we civilized creatures hardly dare to dream any longer, stalks unshamed on every page of Mr. Burke's earlier work. There is love, too, brutal or sublime, and there is self sacrifice, and the unwritten law of the jungle. But above all of these revenge thrones supreme, the chief motive of a majority of the stories, and perchance the first sign of an impending exit from savagery … for anger is momentary, and well known to brute life, but revenge must wait and plan. It may be held the first specifically human emotion, with a special lure for us who, unwillingly, are persuaded to forget it.

Perhaps, however, the main secret of the appeal exerted by the stories of Mr. Burke may be sought in his attitude toward the life he portrays. He remarks somewhere of Morland's canvases, that "half their charm lies in the fact that he saw his subjects on the level: that he was instinctively of them." This may with equal propriety be said of Mr. Burke's own work. To him may also be applied what he writes of Charlie Chaplin: "Like all men who are born in exile, outside the gracious inclosures of life, he does not forget those early years." Mr. Burke has left behind the underworld where he spent those years, but he is still of it. He has been accepted within "the gracious inclosures," and he despises them both as an artist and a former denizen of Limehouse. He pours scorn on "the land of the half-intellectuals and the bland drivel of drawing-rooms and the sleek grace that lures the impressionable away from beauty." He is not an impressionable of this type. Defiantly he asserts that "low" company is not for "the mean-spirited, who fear its candours and fly from it to their drawing-rooms and dissembling gestures."

Always and in every way he remains mercilously truthful, refusing to falsify or sentimentalize the strange, rough, intense life he shows us. He is frank and outspoken in his references to many things forming an inalienable phase of that life, but not open to discussion in more "refined" gatherings. His very frankness, however, is characterized by an instinctive sense for the right word that should constitute an excuse in itself. Nevertheless he has been called vulgar, and this criticism he resents, pointing out that, in this respect, all great art is vulgar … the art of Fielding and Dickens no less than that of Homer and the Old Testament writers. Christ himself, "the greatest of artists," was vulgar, says old Scollard in The Sun in Splendour, and on that account Mr. Burke thinks the more of Him. But at the heart this man, graduated from one of England's supposedly most foul spots, is gloriously pagan… pagan in the same manner and spirit as his little "Gina of the Chinatown" who "opened new doors to the people of Poplar, showing them the old country to which today excursions are almost forbidden; the country of the dear brown earth and the naked flesh, of the wine-cup and flowers and kisses and Homeric laughter." It is, I presume, on all the qualities here suggested, and not solely on any one among them, that his irresistible appeal rests in those stories that will always be primarily associated with his name… stories that have brought one more slice of humanity within the ken of literature and of thinking, open minded, beauty-loving readers.

The line of his novels is barely opened. And the autobiographical character of The Wind and the Rain makes it a little uncertain as a sample of what may be expected hereafter. It is a beautiful tale exquisitely told, a soul searching and bravely veracious record: tender, poignant, moving, and illumined by an astute understanding of the child as well as of human nature in general. But the story is his own, the child himself, and every man is said to hide one such book in his mental makeup. The Sun in Splendour is different … his first determined and sustained effort to break away from what theretofore had been his too exclusive setting. Even here Limehouse, with its inevitable crime, its sadistic proclivities, its precarious existence above and beyond the law, may be sensed, though under new forms and new names. Even here one notes a certain tendency to repetition, a willingness to use over again familiar scenes and characters and themes, indicating that the author's imaginative quality may be centered in expression rather than in the actual creation of new life. But the horizons of this work are wider, the superficial movements of life less predominant, the human analysis far more profound. The central figure and his wonderfully attractive old father are quite novel, unlike anything in the stories … a foiled dreamer about beauty, and a real creator of it foiled by the nature of his success, both taken out of a life that belongs to no one city or district.

To some extent The Sun in Splendour may be described as a book by an artist for artists, but in its wider implications it reaches far beyond that restricted field. It is bursting with sincerity, and with candor of a more sensitive, more spiritual kind. It may not belong with the great novels of all time, but it has a vicelike grip on one's attention and is not easily forgotten when read. Christopher Scollard in The Sun in Splendour is more or less identical with Tommy in The Wind and the Rain, and both with Mr. Burke himself. Of Christopher we are told toward the end of his story that "he was facing what many a young artist has to face; the knowledge that he was only a skilled craftsman." Yet this latest work of Mr. Burke's, as well as all else done by him before, gives evidence of an incorruptible striving for genuine artistic values, plus a capacity for recognizing "the secret beauty lying behind the material beauty of colour and sound" that can generally be found in similar measure, with similar intensity, only among writers who possess within themselves at least the possibility of greatness. And Mr. Burke is not yet forty, I understand. His artistic career is merely begun. It will be wise to watch him well, and it will be safe, I think, to place high hopes on whatever he will do hereafter, no matter what form it may take.