ortal and unearthly passion which
made that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's "little
romance" is altogether another affair.

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