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 imm