"The notion of writers like Proust and Joyce 'destroying' the nineteenth century, as surely as Einstein and Freud were doing with their ideas, is not so fanciful as it might seem. The nineteenth century saw the climax of the philosophy of personal responsibility - the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our actions - which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the classical world. As Lionel Trilling, analyzing Eliot's verdict on Ulysses, was to point out, during the nineteenth century a leading aesthete like Walter Pater, in The Renaissance, to categorize the ability 'to burn with a hard, gem-like flame' as 'success in life.' 'In the nineteenth century,' Trilling wrote, even 'a mind as exquisite and detached as Pater's could take it for granted that upon the life of an individual person a judgment of success or failure might be passed.' The nineteenth-century novel had been essentially concerned with the moral or spiritual success of the individual. A la Recheche and Ulysses marked not merely the entrance of the anti-hero but the destruction of individual heroism as a central element in imaginative creation, and a contemptuous lack of concern for moral balance-striking and verdicts. The exercise of individual free will ceased to be the supremely interesting feature of human behavior."