He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and remain married to him.  He lets Isabella’s passion satisfy itself.  He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death.  He lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor.  He lets Linton die.  His most overt and violent action is the capture of the younger Catherine.  And even there he takes advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering Heights.  He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a brooding spirit that in all material happenings seeks its own.  He makes them his instruments of vengeance.  And Heathcliff’s vengeance, like his passion for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing.  He shows how little he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent.  He falls into a melancholy.  He neither eats nor drinks.  He shuts himself up in Cathy’s little room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy’s bed.

If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this drama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan.  There is no name for it.  It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions.  It has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek:  to drasanti pathein].  But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian; and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek:  to pathonti pathein].  It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confined strictly within the boundaries of the soul.

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of Wuthering Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil.  She thinks that Emily Bronte was greatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity. “‘No use,’ she seems to be saying, ’in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble.  The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair.  Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, doomed child of some half-savage sailor’s holiday, violent and treacherous.  And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather’s crime?’”

All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of Wuthering Heights, and to its greatness.  It is not really any problem of heredity that we have here.  Heredity is, in fact, ignored.  Heathcliff’s race and parentage are unknown.  There is no resemblance between the good old Earnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley.  Hareton does not inherit Hindley’s drunkenness or his cruelty.  It is not through any physical consequence of his father’s vices that Hareton suffers.  Linton is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff.  If Catherine Linton inherits something of Catherine Earnshaw’s charm and temper, it is because the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is an inferior and more physical creature.  She has nothing in her of Catherine Earnshaw’s mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which made that Catherine alive and killed her.  Catherine Linton’s “little romance” is altogether another affair.