Henry Jekyll describes his worst faults at the end of the story, in the section titled "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case." The statement begins as something of an autobiography, telling of how Jekyll was born into a life of privilege and opportunity, but that he had an "impatient gaiety of disposition." He describes this as his worst fault.
From these words alone it seems like what he's describing is simply an excessively cheerful...
Henry Jekyll describes his worst faults at the end of the story, in the section titled "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case." The statement begins as something of an autobiography, telling of how Jekyll was born into a life of privilege and opportunity, but that he had an "impatient gaiety of disposition." He describes this as his worst fault.
From these words alone it seems like what he's describing is simply an excessively cheerful personality, which is at odds with the more serious and stoic attitude that he thinks he should be displaying as a man of wealth and intelligence. We could easily imagine Jekyll embarrassing himself with an excess of emotion, or see this as his own self-imposed "rite of passage," believing that his emotions are what's holding him back from the appearance of respectable adulthood. He says that some people wouldn't have even considered his passions to be all that bad, but his aspirations drove him to feel deep shame over them, and to indulge deeply in them when he chose to. It seems, then, that his true meaning by "impatient gaiety" is that he is addicted to pleasure, a hedonist, and struggles to control himself when it comes to doing what he likes because he sees it as a failure of his willpower.
The great difficulty in this is that it pre-disposed Jekyll to the kind of dual lifestyle that gave rise to the Hyde persona; ultimately Jekyll had so stifled the hedonistic side of himself that it was primed to reveal itself while he was under the influence of his transformative drug.
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