II
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
We read and reread Wuthering Heights because it is like no other book in the world. The nearest approach to it is not English at all, but Russian. Dostoievsky in The Brothers Karamazov has characters in some degree approximating to Heathcliff. In English fiction there is no one in the least like him.
Emily Brontë with her love of life, her passionate adoration of the earth, sweeps us off our feet. She plunges us into a world of elemental lusts and hates and cruelties. Heathcliff is treated brutally and revenges himself even more brutally. The frustrated passion of Catherine for Heathcliff and of Heathcliff for Catherine is scarcely distinguishable from hate; they repay each other with torture for torture, pang for hopeless pang. Judged by his deeds, Heathcliff is as much a monster of evil as Iago, but—and this is what makes Emily Brontë's genius so amazing—we never for a moment judge him by his deeds. The material event never seems to matter. In fact, so far as material actions go, Heathcliff is completely inert. He lets things take their course. His most striking, almost his only violent, action is his running away with Isabella. He does nothing to prevent Catherine from marrying Edgar Linton: his vengeance is completely removed from any material sphere and once accomplished rouses in him no satisfaction: he merely dies. The world of Heathcliff and Catherine is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual conflicts and loves. The whole book moves on a spiritual plane except for one lapse, the unwholesome physical passion of Isabella for her husband. "No brutality disgusted her," says Heathcliff. "I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back."
Catherine is completely innocent when she gives her body to Edgar while her soul belongs to Heathcliff. This is her unforgivable sin, the attempt to sunder the body from the soul.
"Nelly," she cries, "I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
But out of the raging discord that Emily Brontë creates in the stupendous passion of Catherine and Heathcliff she wrings a strange and terrible harmony. One cannot help but gasp at the quiet, peaceful ending:
"I lingered round them under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
In the union of the younger Catherine and the redeemed Hareton one is expected to feel that the souls of the two giant characters are appeased, but we are not interested in that. The deaths of Catherine and Heathcliff matter no more than the death of Cæsar in the play. Catherine is never so much in the picture as when she has passed out of it physically for ever. The whole tragedy is conducted on an invisible and immaterial plane: it is really all written round one line of Browning inverted:
"The passion that left the sky to seek itself in the earth."
We are introduced to it at the very beginning of the book when Lockwood hears and feels the ghost of Catherine: it begins with Heathcliff's passionate outburst at her death: "Oh, God, it is unbearable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"