feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_24_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 25
feat_summary_id: chapter 25
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 25", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-25", "summary": "We start this chapter learning about Sergeant Troy, whom the narrator says is a man with a short memory and no concept of the future. Basically, he lives for the present... but not exactly in a good way. He never expects anything of life, so he's never disappointed. He's fairly honest with men, but he lies to women all the time. Deep down, Troy believes that if you treat women well they'll never be attracted to you: essentially that \"nice guys finish last.\" He comes over to her farm and starts helping out with some of the work. Bathsheba sees him and blushes as she walks by.", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED
  
  
  Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as
  an exceptional being.
  
  He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations
  a superfluity.  Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was
  before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present.  His outlook
  upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that
  projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which
  makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word
  for circumspection, was foreign to Troy.  With him the past was
  yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.
  
  On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as
  one of the most fortunate of his order.  For it may be argued with
  great plausibility that reminiscence is less an endowment than a
  disease, and that expectation in its only comfortable form--that of
  absolute faith--is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form
  of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve,
  curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.
  
  Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of
  expectation, was never disappointed.  To set against this negative
  gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain
  narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed.  But
  limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser
  therefrom: in this attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts
  plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it,
  whilst those who mind it soon cease to suffer.  It is not a denial
  of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy had never
  enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully conscious that what sober
  people missed he enjoyed, his capacity, though really less, seemed
  greater than theirs.
  
  He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like
  a Cretan--a system of ethics above all others calculated to win
  popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and
  the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference
  only to the future.
  
  He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the
  ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded,
  disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile.  This
  treatment had led to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men's
  gallantries, to his own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than
  to the moral profit of his hearers.
  
  His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating
  influence, having separated by mutual consent long ago: thence it
  sometimes happened that, while his intentions were as honourable as
  could be wished, any particular deed formed a dark background which
  threw them into fine relief.  The sergeant's vicious phases being the
  offspring of impulse, and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the
  latter had a modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.
  
  Troy was full of activity, but his activities were less of a
  locomotive than a vegetative nature; and, never being based upon
  any original choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised
  on whatever object chance might place in their way.  Hence, whilst
  he sometimes reached the brilliant in speech because that was
  spontaneous, he fell below the commonplace in action, from inability
  to guide incipient effort.  He had a quick comprehension and
  considerable force of character; but, being without the power to
  combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities
  whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself
  in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension.
  
  He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class--
  exceptionally well educated for a common soldier.  He spoke fluently
  and unceasingly.  He could in this way be one thing and seem another:
  for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the
  husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.
  
  The wondrous power of flattery in _passados_ at woman is a perception
  so universal as to be remarked upon by many people almost as
  automatically as they repeat a proverb, or say that they are
  Christians and the like, without thinking much of the enormous
  corollaries which spring from the proposition.  Still less is it
  acted upon for the good of the complemental being alluded to.
  With the majority such an opinion is shelved with all those trite
  aphorisms which require some catastrophe to bring their tremendous
  meanings thoroughly home.  When expressed with some amount of
  reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with a belief that this flattery
  must be reasonable to be effective.  It is to the credit of men that
  few attempt to settle the question by experiment, and it is for
  their happiness, perhaps, that accident has never settled it for
  them.  Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by deluging her with
  untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may acquire powers
  reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth taught to many by
  unsought and wringing occurrences.  And some profess to have attained
  to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and jauntily
  continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible effect.
  Sergeant Troy was one.
  
  He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind
  the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing.  There was
  no third method.  "Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man." he
  would say.
  
  This person's public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his
  arrival there.  A week or two after the shearing, Bathsheba, feeling
  a nameless relief of spirits on account of Boldwood's absence,
  approached her hayfields and looked over the hedge towards the
  haymakers.  They consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and
  flexuous forms, the former being the men, the latter the women, who
  wore tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon
  their shoulders.  Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in a less forward
  meadow, Clark humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to
  which Jan made no attempt to keep time with his.  In the first mead
  they were already loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and
  windrows, and the men tossing it upon the waggon.
  
  From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and went on
  loading unconcernedly with the rest.  It was the gallant sergeant,
  who had come haymaking for pleasure; and nobody could deny that
  he was doing the mistress of the farm real knight-service by this
  voluntary contribution of his labour at a busy time.
  
  As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and sticking his
  pitchfork into the ground and picking up his crop or cane, he came
  forward.  Bathsheba blushed with half-angry embarrassment, and
  adjusted her eyes as well as her feet to the direct line of her path.
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 25
target: We start this chapter learning about Sergeant Troy, whom the narrator says is a man with a short memory and no concept of the future. Basically, he lives for the present... but not exactly in a good way. He never expects anything of life, so he's never disappointed. He's fairly honest with men, but he lies to women all the time. Deep down, Troy believes that if you treat women well they'll never be attracted to you: essentially that "nice guys finish last." He comes over to her farm and starts helping out with some of the work. Bathsheba sees him and blushes as she walks by.