Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre

BRACKENBURN,
April 1925.
DEAR ETHEL AND ARTHUR—
It is appropriate, in a way, that I should give you this book when so much of it was written under your roof. It is a romance, and this has not been, during the last twenty years, a favourable time for romances. But I like to give it to you because you know how it was written, in a very happy summer after a long and arduous lecture tour during which, more than ever before, I learned to love your country.
I wrote it as a rest and a refreshment, and I will tell you frankly that I have enjoyed writing it very much. But I do not know whether, in these stern days, stories are intended to be enjoyed either by the writer of them or the reader.
I have noticed sometimes that people speak rather scornfully of a story as readable. But if it be not first of all readable what afterwards can it be? Surely dead before it is born.
I hope then, and I believe, that this tale is readable at least. I know no more than that what it is—fancy, story allegory, what you will. I might invoke the great names of Hoffmann and Hawthorne for its Godfathers. I might recall a story much beloved by me, Sintram and His Companions , did I not, most justly, fear the comparison!
But the word allegory is, in these days, a dangerous one, and some one will soon be showing me that we have, each one of us, his Sea-Fog, his White Tower, and that it is the fault of his own weakness if he does not fling out of the window his Red-Haired man.
No, no, God forbid. This is a tale and nothing but a tale, and all I ask is that once beginning it you will find it hard to lay down unfinished—
and that you will think of me always as
Your affectionate friend
HUGH.