four occasions I worked with a curious sense of exaltation. On the fifth
occasion I was seized with a sudden and unreasoning panic that paralysed
me. Perhaps it was a failure of digestion, perhaps a want of sleep. Anyhow,
at that moment I was a coward."

The truth is that, except for the aforesaid stars who dwell apart, we all
have the potential saint and the potential sinner, the hero and the coward,
the honest man and the dishonest man within us.

There is a fine poem in _A Shropshire Lad_ that puts the case of the black
sheep as pregnantly as it can be put:--

There sleeps in Shrewsbury gaol to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad if things went right
Than most that sleep outside.

If things went right.... Do not, I pray you, think that in saying this I am
holding the candle to that deadly doctrine of determinism, or that, like
the tragic novelist, I see man only as a pitiful animal caught in the trap
of blind circumstance. If I believed that I should say "Better dead." But
what I do say is that we are so variously composed that circumstance does
play a powerful part in giving rein to this or that element in us and
making the scale go down for good or bad, and that often the best of us
only miss the wrong turning by a hair's breadth. Dirt, it is said, is only
matter in the wrong place. Put it in the right place, and it ceases to be
dirt. Give that man with twenty-seven convictions against him a chance of
revealing the better metal that is in him, and, lo! he is hailed as a hero
and decorated with the V.C.