The Seats of the Mighty, Complete

e, and the writing of it was attended with as much searching ofheart as enthusiasm. I had long been saturated by the early history ofFrench Canada, as perhaps 'The Trail of the Sword' bore witness, andparticularly of the period of the Conquest, and I longed for a subjectwhich would, in effect, compel me to write; for I have strong views uponthis business of compulsion in the mind of the writer. Unless a thinghas seized a man, has obsessed him, and he feels that it excludesall other temptations to his talent or his genius, his book willnot convince. Before all else he must himself be overpowered by theinsistence of his subject, then intoxicated with his idea, and, beingstill possessed, become master of his material while remaining the slaveof his subject. I believe that every book which has taken hold of thepublic has represented a kind of self-hypnotism on the part of thewriter. I am further convinced that the book which absorbs the author,which possesses him as he writes it, has the effect of isolatinghim into an atmosphere which is not sleep, and which is not absolutewakefulness, but a place between the two, where the working worldis indistinct and the mind is swept along a flood submerging theself-conscious but not drowning into unconsciousness.Such, at any rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that the booksof mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of theMighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just suchconditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the subject,which must of itself have driving power, then the main character, whichbecomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my ownwork has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of mybooks has always been reducible to its title.For years I had wished to write an historical novel of the conquestof Canada or the settlement of the United Empire loyalists and thesubsequent War of 1812, but the central idea and the central characterhad not come to me; and without both and the driving power of a big ideaand of a big character, a book did not seem to me possible. The humanthing with the grip of real life was necessary. At last, as pointed outin the prefatory note of the first edition, published in the spring of1896 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 MajorRobert 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, theremaining three thousand words being made up of abstracts and appendicescollected by the editor. The narrative was written in a very ornate andgrandiloquent style, but the hero of the memoirs was so evidently a manof remarkable character, enterprise and adventure, that I saw in the fewscattered bones of the story which he unfolded the skeleton of an amplehistorical romance. There was necessary to offset this buoyant andcourageous Scotsman, adventurous and experienced, a character of therace which captured him and held him in leash till just before thetaking of Quebec. I therefore found in the character of Doltaire--whichwas the character of Voltaire spelled with a big D--purely a creatureof the imagination, one who, as the son o --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.