Lawrence wrote a number of crude, defiant, and theatrical romances of contemporary life, proclaiming his gospel of victorious manhood. His physical force doctrine was called by detractors the creed of "Muscular Blackguardism." Guy is his representative hero, a Byronic, arrogant, aristocratic, young man of prodigious bodily strength and implacable temper--a Berserk out of his element in an age of peace and civilization, who discharges his pent up energies in libertine amours and physical sports, in the lack of more serious fields for his prowess.