Seats of the Mighty | Page 2

the books
of mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of the
Mighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just
such conditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the
subject, which must of itself have driving power, then the main
character, which becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the
subject in my own work has always been translatable into a phrase.
Nearly every one of my books has always been reducible to its title.
For years I had wished to write an historical novel of the conquest of
Canada or the settlement of the United Empire loyalists and the
subsequent War of 1812, but the central idea and the central character
had not come to me; and without both and the driving power of a big
idea and of a big character, a book did not seem to me possible. The
human thing with the grip of real life was necessary. At last, as pointed
out in the prefatory note of the first edition, published in the spring of
1896 by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., of New York, and Messrs.
Methuen & Co., of London, I ran across a tiny little volume in the
library of Mr. George M. Fairchild, Jr., of Quebec, called the Memoirs
of Major Robert Stobo. It was published by John S. Davidson, of
Market Street, Pittsburgh, with an introduction by an editor who signed
himself "N. B.C."
The Memoirs proper contained about seventeen thousand words, the
remaining three thousand words being made up of abstracts and
appendices collected by the editor. The narrative was written in a very
ornate and grandiloquent style, but the hero of the memoirs was so
evidently a man of remarkable character, enterprise and adventure, that
I saw in the few scattered bones of the story which he unfolded the
skeleton of an ample historical romance. There was necessary to offset
this buoyant and courageous Scotsman, adventurous and experienced, a
character of the race which captured him and held him in leash till just

before the taking of Quebec. I therefore found in the character of
Doltaire--which was the character of Voltaire spelled with a big
D--purely a creature of the imagination, one who, as the son of a
peasant woman and Louis XV, should be an effective offset to Major
Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire in the Memoirs. There could not
be, nor of the plot on which the story was based, because it was all
imagination. Likewise, there was no mention of Alixe Duvarney in the
Memoirs, nor of Bigot or Madame Cournal and all the others. They too,
when not characters of the imagination, were lifted out of the history of
the time; but the first germ of the story came from 'The Memoirs of
Robert Stobo', and when 'The Seats of the Mighty' was first published
in 'The Atlantic Monthly' the subtitle contained these words: "Being the
Memoirs of Captain Robert Stobo, sometime an officer in the Virginia
Regiment, and afterwards of Amherst's Regiment."
When the book was published, however, I changed the name of Robert
Stobo to Robert Moray, because I felt I had no right to saddle Robert
Stobo's name with all the incidents and experiences and strange
enterprises which the novel contained. I did not know then that perhaps
it might be considered an honour by Robert Stobo's descendants to
have his name retained. I could not foresee the extraordinary popularity
of 'The Seats of the Mighty', but with what I thought was a sense of
honour I eliminated his name and changed it to Robert Moray. 'The
Seats of the Mighty' goes on, I am happy to say, with an
ever-increasing number of friends. It has a position perhaps not wholly
deserved, but it has crystallised some elements in the life of the
continent of America, the history of France and England, and of the
British Empire which may serve here and there to inspire the love of
things done for the sake of a nation rather than for the welfare of an
individual.
I began this introduction by saying that the book was started in the
summer of 1894. That was at a little place called Mablethorpe in
Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. For several months I
worked in absolute seclusion in that out-of-the-way spot which had not
then become a Mecca for trippers, and on the wonderful sands,
stretching for miles upon miles coastwise and here and there as much

as a mile out to the sea, I tried to live over again the days of Wolfe and
Montcalm. Appropriately enough the book was begun in a hotel at
Mablethorpe called "The Book in Hand." The name was got, I believe,
from the fact that, in a