In the Choleric-Melancholic, choleric action rules and melancholic measure serves it, supplying criterion, comparison, standard, precision, and correction. The result is excellence placed at the service of achievement: doing it is not enough; it has to be done well. The image is the closed circuit: electricity that does not discharge just any way, but circulates under containment, builds up tension, and is released only at the right point.
The comparison that dominates their life is not, in the first place, with others, but between what they are and the standard they judge necessary. Before carrying something out, they ask what is missing, how to raise the level, and what to correct; often they prepare, refine, and only then act, though they can also correct along the way. Rivalry shows up strongly when an exclusive good is at stake, such as a position or a prize, but competition does not define them, and they do not need to surpass everyone above them to be at peace. In my observation, the Choleric-Melancholic accepts a deserved defeat more easily, while an unjust defeat tends to become fuel. I have also observed that they can be sociable and affable, which belies the caricature of the closed, somber choleric, and that they usually have great self-control, put at the service of finishing the work; that control, however, is not yet self-mastery in the moral sense.
Their inverse pair is the Melancholic-Choleric, and the question that separates them is this: does measure perfect what one intends to achieve, or does power achieve what has been measured? In the Choleric-Melancholic, action comes first as the end, and the criterion qualifies the way of doing it; they mainly compare their performance with the standard, while the Melancholic-Choleric compares their position more with that of others and with the desired good.
The good proper to this form is to do with excellence what has been recognized as one’s task, with a technical demand that resists improvisation and a care for the work that others sometimes notice only years later. The temptation proper to it is born precisely from this excellence, when it turns into a claim on the result: I did everything right, I prepared better than anyone, so I should win. The error is not in contesting a truly unjust decision, but in turning the quality of the work into a title to what quality alone does not guarantee. From here pride and envy can be born, but also a quieter blindness: intent on effectiveness and the standard, they can fail to notice a lack in the way they receive and include people.
The mature form of the Choleric-Melancholic pursues excellence without demanding victory as a reward. Excellence stops being a claim and becomes a duty of the act itself, done well because it ought to be done well, whether they win or not. And it is perhaps there that this temperament, so demanding of itself, finds the freedom no victory would give it: to hand a work well done to God and leave the result with Him.