It continues without a break for eighteen years and by the side of it any passion that we have read of in modern English fiction seems so puny and frigid as to be almost laughable.
The fight of Catherine to get through to her lover, hampered by his flesh, forms really the great struggle of the book.
"I looked round impatiently"—it is Heathcliff's poignant cry—"I felt her by me—I could almost see her, and yet I could not!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years."
It is on reading passages like this that one realises the futility of trying to explain away genius. This could only have been written by one who had been whirled in a maelstrom of passion, racked and tortured on the wheel of life in a way that we know Emily Brontë was never called upon to endure, or—it is the result of a divine inspiration vouchsafed, one knows not how, irrespective of mortal experience.
This wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit is one of the most deeply tragic, most deeply moving ideas ever presented to man.
"In every cloud," he says at the end of the drama, "in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her...."
Again: "I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but do not satisfy itself...."
And again: "There is one who won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear—even mine."
No—the real ending of Wuthering Heights does not lie in any concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.
The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor after Heathcliff is dead.