As an individual, Clym is about as unsuited to be a husband as Eustacia is to be a wife. At one point, Eustacia describes him to Wildeve as a St. Paul and remarks that the qualities summed up in this allusion hardly make him a good companion. The phrase that describes him best is "inner strenuousness." He is as Spartan in his style of life as a Thoreau; at the least, this makes him hard to get along with, not merely for his wife, but for any other human being. It is ironical that in this aspect of his personality he is so much like his mother, who is inflexible in her attitude toward her son. Almost the only person in the novel with whom Clym is shown to be content is Humphrey, when the two of them cut furze together.
However admirable Clym's personality may be, certain sides of it are unattractive, but this is a tribute to Hardy's ability to create lifelike characters. Clym is given to self-pity, and he has in him a curious unwillingness to act. His delay in trying to establish contact with his mother after his marriage is repeated in his hesitating to ask Eustacia to come back to him. His inability to act enables Hardy to show him at the mercy of events or circumstances or chance, a demonstration of the theme of the novel. He is meant to be, in other words, a modern man: able to understand but unable to act decisively.
