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DAVID HARUM

A Story of American Life

BY

EDWARD NOYES WESTCOTT

NEW YORKD. APPLETON AND COMPANY1899

Copyright, 1898,By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

INTRODUCTION.

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of our contemporary nativefiction is an increasing tendency to subordinate plot or story to thebold and realistic portrayal of some of the types of American life andmanners. And the reason for this is not far to seek. The extraordinarymixing of races which has been going on here for more than a century hasproduced an enormously diversified human result; and the products ofthis "hybridization" have been still further differentiated by anenvironment that ranges from the Everglades of Florida to the glaciersof Alaska. The existence of these conditions, and the great literaryopportunities which they contain, American writers long ago perceived;and, with a generally true appreciation of artistic values, they havecreated from them a gallery of brilliant genre pictures which to-daystand for the highest we have yet attained in the art of fiction.

Thus it is that we have (to mention but a few) studies of Louisiana andher people by Mr. Cable; of Virginia and Georgia by Thomas Nelson Pageand Joel Chandler Harris; of New England by Miss Jewett and MissWilkins; of the Middle West by Miss French (Octave Thanet); of the greatNorthwest by Hamlin Garland; of Canada and the land of the habitans byGilbert Parker; and finally, though really first in point of time, theForty-niners and their successors by Bret Harte. This list might beindefinitely extended, for it is growing daily, but it is long enough asit stands to show that every section of our country has, or soon willhave, its own painter and historian, whose works will live and become apermanent part of our literature in just the degree that they areartistically true. Some of these writers have already produced manybooks, while others have gained general recognition and even fame by thevividness and power of a single study, like Mr. Howe with The Story of aCountry Town. But each one, it will be noticed, has chosen for his fieldof work that part of our country wherein he passed the early andformative years of his life; a natural selection that is, perhaps, anunconscious affirmation of David Harum's aphorism: "Ev'ry hoss c'n do athing better 'n' spryer if he's ben broke to it as a colt."

In the case of the present volume the conditions are identical withthose just mentioned. Most of the scenes are laid in central New York,where the author, Edward Noyes Westcott, was born, September 24, 1847,and where he died of consumption, March 31, 1898. Nearly all his lifewas passed in his native city of Syracuse, and although banking and notauthorship was the occupation of his active years, yet his sensitive andimpressionable temperament had become so saturated with the localatmosphere, and his retentive memory so charged with facts, that when atlength he took up the pen he was able to create in David Harum acharacter so original, so true, and so strong, yet withal sodelightfully quaint and humorous, that we are at once compelled to admitthat here is a new and permanent addition to the long list of Americanliterary portraits.

The book is a novel, and throughout it runs a love story which ischaracterized by sympathetic treatment and a constantly increasinginterest; but the title rôle is taken by the old country banker, DavidHarum: dry, quaint, somewhat illiterate, no doubt, but possessing anamazing amount of knowledge not found in printed books, and holding fastto the cheerful belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless inthis world. Or, in his own words: "A reasonable amount of fleas is goodfor a dog—they keep him f'm broodin' on bein' a dog." Thishorse-trading country banker and reputed Shylock, but realphilanthropist, is an accurate portrayal of a type that exists in therural districts of central New York to-day. Variations of him may beseen daily, driving about in their road wagons or seated in their "bankparlors," shrewd, sharp-tongued, honest as the sunlight from most pointsof view, but in a horse trade much inclined to follow the rule laid downby Mr. Harum himself for such transactions: "Do unto the other fellerthe way he'd like to do unto you—an' do it fust."