CHAPTER IV. 



CHARACTER OF THE ACTIVE AND LESS 

 IMPASSIONED MAN. 



IN the various notes of character men and women have 

 much in common, although the less pleasing features 

 of the unimpassioned are not so conspicuously visible 

 in the more complex lives of men. And herein, indeed, 

 is a powerful argument for enlarging and enriching 

 and, so to say, complicating the lives of women. Even 

 those who do not object to candid comment, or who, it 

 may be, admire it, would probably prefer to have it in 

 small fragments and spread over a large surface. 



The majority of leading names in the various fields 

 of human endeavour have been men and women whose 

 emotions were neither deep nor tempestuous, and 

 whose minds were of the active and wakeful rather 

 than of the pensive or dreamy order. While very few 

 examples of the deeply emotional sort come readily to 

 mind, there come quickly a varying host of the alert 

 and less emotional. Against the names of Burns, 

 Byron, Hawthorn, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, 

 one quickly pits the names of Erasmus, More, Queen 

 Elizabeth, Bunyan, Gibbon, Johnson, Wesley, New- 

 man, Napoleon, Jane Austen, Gladstone, Ruskin, 

 Carlyle, and Arnold. Other memorable names come 

 to mind which belong to neither extreme. The names 

 in each group have but little in common save that the 



