PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH RED HAIR A ROMANTIC MACABRE By HUGH WALPOLE _NEW YORK_ _GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY_ COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY, INC. (HARPER'S BAZAAR) PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH RED HAIR --A-- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY FRIENDS ETHEL AND ARTHUR FOWLER DEDICATORY LETTER. 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. . . . Within these few restrictions, I think, every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he then keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprise the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him. As a genius of the highest rank observes in his fifth chapter of the Bathos, "The great art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join the credible with the surprising."