saying this, I am not of course thinking
mainly of Carlyle's outer life. This, indeed, is in places freely
drawn upon, as the outer lives of Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoi are
drawn upon in "David Copperfield," "The Mill on the Floss," "Anna
Karenina." Entepfuhl is only another name for Ecclefechan; the picture
of little Diogenes eating his supper out-of-doors on fine summer
evenings, and meanwhile watching the sun sink behind the western
hills, is clearly a loving transcript from memory; even the idyllic
episode of Blumine may be safely traced back to a romance of Carlyle's
youth. But to investigate the connection at these and other points
between the mere externals of the two careers is a matter of little
more than curious interest. It is because it incorporates and
reproduces so much of Carlyle's inner history that the story of
Teufelsdroeckh is really important. Spiritually considered, the whole
narrative is, in fact, a "symbolic myth," in which the writer's
personal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save in
setting and accessories. Like Teufelsdroeckh, Carlyle while still a
young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he had
been bred; like Teufelsdroeckh, he had thereupon passed into the
"howling desert of infidelity;" like Teufelsdroeckh, he had known all
the agonies and anguish of a long period of blank scepticism and
insurgent despair, during which, turn whither he would, life responded
with nothing but negations to every question and appeal. And as to
Teufelsdroeckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer in Paris, so to
Carlyle in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, there had come a moment of sudden
and marvellous illumination, a mystical crisis from which he had
emerged a different man. The parallelism is so obvious and so close as
to leave no room for doubt that the story of Teufelsdroeckh is
substantially a piece of spiritual autobiography.

This admitted, the question arises whether Carlyle had any purpose,
beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiences
for the human setting of his philosophy. It seems evident that he had.
As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than a
merely personal interest and meaning. He wrote of himself because he
saw in himself a type of his restless and much-troubled epoch; because
he knew that in a broad sense his history was the history of thousands
of other young men in the generation to which he belonged. The age