“Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character.” Elsewhere, on the same theme, she indicates her general impression of the relative amounts of human wisdom and folly:[464] “And to judge wisely I suppose we must know how things appear to the unwise; that kind of appearance making the larger part of the world’s history.” This is in agreement with the point of the lines written on the portrait of Beau Nash at Bath, placed between the busts of Newton and Pope: “This picture placed these busts between, Gives satire all its strength: Wisdom and Wit are little seen, But Folly at full length.” But this Victorian painter of Folly, and at least some of her contemporaries, endeavored to make satire realistic by drawing Wit and Wisdom on a proportionate scale. It was in recognition of this that Stevenson said, “My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamund Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education of young men.” Victorian literature would not have cared to produce a _Ship of Fools_,--though a passenger list might easily be culled out from its fiction,--nor a _Hudibras_, nor a _Dunciad_, nor even a _Tartuffe_, for George Warrington voiced the general sentiment when he said of that great drama that it could not be reckoned great in comparison with _Othello_, because “‘a mere villainous hypocrite should not be chief of a great piece.’”[465] This segment of literature may not be more sincere in its claim of truth-telling, but it shows more art in its method; and it is perhaps even less flattering to human nature in its assumption that simple exposure, without exaggeration, is quite enough. Nor did it ever expect its satire to prove revolutionary. Peacock, first on the list, confessed, through one of his characters, of having been cured of a passion for reforming the world, “by the conviction of the inefficacy of moral theory with respect to producing a practical change in the mass of mankind.” He adds,--[466] “Custom is the pillar round which opinion twines, and interest is the tie that binds it. It is not by reason that practical change can be effected, but by making a puncture to the quick in the feelings of personal hope and personal fear.”