From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats borne on the swift current of the rushing river of Time. Whether our boat sink or swim, or turn to the right or to the left, is the matter of intensest interest--indeed, our interest is usually so intense in this subject that we can think of nothing else with any zest. And as we study our own problem of navigation on the waters of life, we watch all our neighbours to see how they succeed or fail, and why. Their problem is our problem and ours is theirs. Hence it is that stories of human life have formed the substance of the world’s greatest literature since the days of Homer. Before outlining the history of the literary form which the universal human story has taken, let us explain the meaning of “the dramatic.” Drama deals with the crises in individual lives. While our boats on the current of Time sail smoothly and straight on their way, there is no drama, nothing that can be called dramatic, and so no material for an interesting story; but the moment that any obstacle or force of any kind, exterior or interior, causes the steady onward course of the life to cease or turn aside, however little, that moment we have the dramatic. So for the elements of a drama we must have a _collision_ of life forces, one of which forces is the onward movement of some individual human life. The other force may be circumstances, or “Fate,” as we call it; or it may be another human life. When but two forces meet, we have the simplest form of the drama, such as we may see in any short story or a one-act play. In a novel or a drama in acts we shall find a collision of several and various forces, usually different human lives meeting and influencing each other. While the human story has been the same, and the principles of dramatic construction have been but little changed in several thousand years, the artistic form has changed with changing conditions, and the history of its development is intensely interesting. The first form in which the story of life was told was the epic poem, as for example Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad was the tale of the “wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” That force, coming straight athwart the current of the warlike lives of all the Greek and Trojan heroes, could not but be dramatic, for there was not one of them whose onward movement was not changed in some way, and of course the changes were interesting in proportion to the importance of the lives of the subjects--the greater the subject the greater the drama (if adequately executed) in the world’s literary history.