Par-dessus le marché or What Price an Art of Excess?

Abstract

It is not surprising that in his Study of Thomas Hardy, which is an early statement of what were to be some of his central themes, Lawrence dwelt at length on the notion of excess. For this was the focus of a cardinal recognition. Lawrence was deeply affected by Hardy’s sense of the inhuman scale of life in which humanity ultimately has its being. As a late-Victorian agnostic, Hardy had come to see humanity itself as an excess, as an unnecessary life form thrown up by the evolutionary process...