no sensualist, hates
and loathes Isabella and her body.

But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that
betrayed her. Emily Bronte is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff.
It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does
not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred
that he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery
cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover's
obvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Bronte
deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that
that issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonment
of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily,
however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a
tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or
unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who was
ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar
obviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did not
need it, Emily let it go.

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired and
tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when she
said in her preface to _Wuthering Heights_: "Heathcliff betrays one
solitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine; which
is a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied
esteem for Nelly Dean." But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman--"a ghoul,
an afreet"--I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforce
half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself
to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is
poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to make
him "decent", for he is "going to be good", to his last hour of piteous
dependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that,
horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child.
Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance.

"On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:

"'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how
long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before
I do!'

"'For sh