But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better nature triumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and their home is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her true place of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her inner nature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide through the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And when Heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is she deceived as to his true nature. She knows the depth of his depravity, and thus warns the girl who has fallen in love with him:
"He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic;—he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,—I say, let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge."
But Catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost brutal delight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girl does not trust her word.
Then comes the strife between Edgar and Heathcliff for the soul, so it seems, of Catharine. There is no jealousy on Edgar's part. The book never stoops to anything so earthly. Edgar loathes Heathcliff and cannot understand Catharine's affection for her early playmate. Although she never for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to Heathcliff, it is this strife that causes her death. The strife between good and evil wears her out.
Even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. It is still joined to Heathcliff's. It resembles here the story of Paola and Francesca. Catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in her haunting presence. Heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping Catharine from Paradise. In life she would not let him from her presence, and she clings to him now. It is the story of Undine reversed. Undine gained a soul through a mortal's love. And we feel toward the close that Catharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet Heathcliff's better spirit. Catharine while living had prevented Heathcliff from killing her brother. Although he loved Catharine better than himself, and would have made any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for her offspring than for his own. But the spirit of Catharine lived in her child and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he had no pleasure in his revenge upon the son of Hindley nor on the daughter of Edgar Linton.
In the tenderness that once or twice comes over Heathcliff as he looks at Hareton Earnshaw, there is a ray of promise that he may be redeemed. And in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that Catharine's restless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving to bring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature in Hareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender idyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close the atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows of Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme.
Wuthering Heights is a novel not of externals, not of character, but of something deeper, more vital. The love of Catharine and Heathcliff has no physical basis; it is the union of souls evil, but not material. It is the sex of spirit, not of body, that adds its might to the resistless force that unites these two. Notwithstanding the external pictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to his canvas, the book is a soul-tragedy.
Wuthering Heights cannot be classed among the so-called popular novels. It has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers of fiction. It has received the warmest praise from the poet Swinburne. In The Athenæum of June 16, 1883, he thus eulogises it:
"Now in Wuthering Heights this one thing needful ['logical and moral certitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as in King Lear or The Duchess of Malfi, in The Bride of Lammermoor or Notre-Dame de Paris. From the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragic passion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flying sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is no monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. This is the first and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown of all success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is that distinguishes the hand of Emily from the hand of Charlotte Brontë. All the works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling, and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."
At the close of this essay he writes: