One reason why the conduct of these hypothetical scholars is particularly irritating is that John Masefield is a writer of strong individuality. He has a distinct and easily recognizable style; his theme may be a battle of wits between Tiger Roche and the rebel hunters of 1798, or the tragedy of Nan Hardwick and the mutton parsties and the malicious Pargetters, or the great intrigues of royal Spain, or the ambitions of Pompey, or the soul of man in its relation to the mercy of God--whatever his theme may be, his style is the same. The writer's eyes may be fixed upon the mysteries of his own heart, or they may be searching the boundless heavens; he is, nevertheless, always a realist. They may be curiously studying the most ordinary details of modern life; he is, nevertheless, always an idealist. So the intellectual, perhaps it might be said the spiritual, attitude of John Masefield is unvarying. And in this is to be found the reason for the intense individuality of the writer as seen in his works, for the feeling, common to all his readers, of being in direct communication with him. And the style of the sequence of sonnets in the Shakespearean manner is much the same as that of the stories about pirates and the drama of ancient Japan. The nervous expressive diction, the direct Elizabethan colloquialism, these things are Masefield; the form may vary, but not in its characteristics, the language. A writer's attitude toward life and toward the things beyond life is his own; it is not to be accounted for by heredity or environment. But a writer's style must necessarily be influenced, by what he reads and by the talk of those with whom he spends the formative periods of his life. Even the careless reader of John Masefield's books will notice occasionally in them, especially in the lyrics, a strong Celtic flavor. Masefield's "Sea-Fever" and "Roadways" and "Cardigan Bay" and "Trade Winds" and "The Harper's Song" surely belong to the same family as Eva Gore Booth's "The Little Waves of Breffny" and William Butler Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Furthermore, Masefield has that belief in the beauty of tragedy, tragedy in itself without regard to its moral significance, which is characteristic of many of the Irish writers of our generation. In the preface to "The Tragedy of Nan" he writes: