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Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in Wuthering Heights.  And if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Bronte.

In Wuthering Heights we are plunged apparently into a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades him.  Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest due.  He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley’s son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not brutal to him.  The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for hopeless pang.  When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries Isabella, Edgar’s sister, in order that he may torture to perfection Catherine and Edgar and Isabella.  His justice is more than poetic.  The love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed.  He knows that he has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw.  It is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back by robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that they possess, their Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights.  He loathes above all loathely creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella.  The white-blooded thing is so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive.  But with an unearthly cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw and of Edgar Linton.  This supreme deed accomplished, he lets the creature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands.  Judged by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil.

But—­and this is what makes Emily Bronte’s work stupendous—­not for a moment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds.  Properly speaking, there are no bare deeds to judge him by.  Each deed comes wrapt in its own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour.  The whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed.  The spirit of it, like Emily Bronte’s spirit, is superbly regardless of the material event.  As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly inert.  He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance.  He lets things take their course.