It was in the winter of 1892, when on a visit to French Canada, that I
made up my mind I would write the volume which the public knows as ‘The
Seats of the Mighty,’ but I did not begin the composition until early in
1894. It was finished by the beginning of February, 1895, and began to
appear in ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ in March of that year. It was not my
first attempt at historical fiction, because I had written ‘The Trail of
the Sword’ in the year 1893, but it was the first effort on an ambitious
scale, and the writing of it was attended with as much searching of
heart as enthusiasm. I had long been saturated by the early history of
French Canada, as perhaps ‘The Trail of the Sword’ bore witness, and
particularly of the period of the Conquest, and I longed for a subject
which would, in effect, compel me to write; for I have strong views upon
this business of compulsion in the mind of the writer. Unless a thing
has seized a man, has obsessed him, and he feels that it excludes
all other temptations to his talent or his genius, his book will
not convince. Before all else he must himself be overpowered by the
insistence of his subject, then intoxicated with his idea, and, being
still possessed, become master of his material while remaining the slave
of his subject. I believe that every book which has taken hold of the
public has represented a kind of self-hypnotism on the part of the
writer. I am further convinced that the book which absorbs the author,
which possesses him as he writes it, has the effect of isolating
him into an atmosphere which is not sleep, and which is not absolute
wakefulness, but a place between the two, where the working world
is indistinct and the mind is swept along a flood submerging the
self-conscious but not drowning into unconsciousness.
Such, at any rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that 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 far-off day, a ship was wrecked upon the coast at Mablethorpe, and the
only person saved was the captain, who came ashore with a Bible in his
hands. During the writing now and again a friend would come to me from
London or elsewhere, and there would be a day off, full of literary
tattle, but immediately my friends were gone I was lost again in the
atmosphere of the middle of the eighteenth century.
I stayed at Mablethorpe until the late autumn, and then I went to
Harrogate, exchanging the sea for the moors, and there, still living the
open-air life, I remained for several months until I had finished the
book. The writing of it knew no interruption and was happily set. It
was a thing apart, and not a single untoward invasion of other interests
affected its course.
The title of the book was for long a trouble to me. Months went by
before I could find what I wanted. Scores of titles occurred to me,
but each was rejected. At last, one day when I was being visited by
Mr. Grant Richards, since then a London publisher, but at that time a
writer, who had come to interview me for ‘Great Thoughts’, I told him of
my difficulties regarding the title. I was saying that I felt the title
should be, as it were, the kernel of a book. I said: “You see, it is a
struggle of one simple girl against principalities and powers; it is the
final conquest of the good over the great. In other words, the book will
be an illustration of the text, ‘He has put down the mighty from their
seats, and has exalted the humble and meek.’” Then, like a flash, the
title came ‘The Seats of the Mighty’.
Since the phrase has gone into the language and was from the very first
a popular title, it seems strange that the literary director of the
American firm that published the book should take strong exception to
it on the ground that it was grandiloquent. I like to think that I was
firm, and that I declined to change the title.
I need say no more save that the book was dramatised by myself, and
produced, first at Washington by Herbert (now Sir Herbert) Beerbohm Tree
in the winter of 1897 and 1898, and in the spring of 1898 it opened his
new theatre in London.