The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame.  Even Linton Heathcliff, that “whey-faced, whining wretch”, that physical degenerate, demonstrates the higher law.  His weakness is begotten by his father’s loathing on his mother’s terror.

Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical.  You only get a taste of it once in Isabella’s unwholesome love for Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly impure.  And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella’s fear of Heathcliff.  Heathcliff understood her.  He says of her, “’No brutality disgusted her....  I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back.’” This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff.  They are elemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire.  They are clean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean.

True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator:  “We feel that one must have lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of Wuthering Heights; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion—­love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love."[A]

[Footnote A:  Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul.  It taught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body.  Thus Catherine’s treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery.  It is her innocence that makes it possible.  She goes to Edgar Linton’s arms with blind eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till it is done and she is punished for it.  She is punished for the sin of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul.  All her life after she sees her sin.  She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff has her soul.

“‘You love Edgar Linton,’ Nelly Dean says, ’and Edgar loves you ... where is the obstacle?’

“’Here! and here!’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast:  ’in whichever place the soul lives.  In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong.’...  ’I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there hadn’t brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’”