The book has faults, many and glaring faults.  You have to read it many times before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities.  For it is probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story of two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposed to tell.  Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possibly have heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene, dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep.  Sometimes you are carried back in a time and sometimes forward.  You have to think hard before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is.  You cannot get over Lockwood’s original mistake.  And this poor device of narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium.  It simply happens.

And that is how Emily Bronte’s genius triumphs over all her faults.  It is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not—­in the third reading anyhow—­aware of them.  They disappear, they are destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever saw them.  All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure her light, or quench her fire.  Things happen before your eyes, and it does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or Catherine, tells you of their happening.

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities throughout.  Nelly especially.  The tale only begins to move when Lockwood drops out and Nelly takes it up.  At that point Emily Bronte’s style becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it never falters or changes its essential character.

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality of style that she stands so far above her sister.  She has no purple patches, no decorative effects.  No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers.  She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those dreadful second-hand symbolic figures—­Hope, Imagination, Memory, and the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in Charlotte’s pages.  There are no angels in her rainbows.  Her “grand style” goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty.  It is not possible to praise Charlotte’s style without reservations; it is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities without suppressing her defects.  What was a pernicious habit with Charlotte, her use of words like “peruse”, “indite”, “retain”, with Emily is a mere slip of the pen.  There are only, I think, three of such slips in Wuthering Heights.  Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst things with her best.  She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of style are sinfullest.  It is not always possible to give a scene, word for word, from Charlotte’s novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.