Teufelsdroeckh is further utilised as the mouthpiece of some of Carlyle's more extravagant speculations and of such ideas as he wished to throw out as it were tentatively, and without himself being necessarily held responsible for them. There is thus much point as well as humour in those sudden turns of the argument, when, after some exceptionally wild outburst on his _eidolon's_ part, Carlyle sedately reproves him for the fantastic character or dangerous tendency of his opinions. It is in connection with the dramatic scheme of the book that the third element, that of autobiography, enters into its texture, for the story of Teufelsdroeckh is very largely a transfigured version of the story of Carlyle himself. In 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.