Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, with their minds saturated with the same theme, and I can fancy nothing in the history of human thought more interesting or encouraging than the studies of this theme as presented to us in their works published we may say, speaking very roughly, three centuries apart.
This of course is another story, but a brief reference to it is essential for my present purpose.
All the old religions of the world were based upon Astronomy, that and Medicine being the only sciences in existence. Sun, Moon, and Stars were all worshipped as Gods, and thus it was that even down to Dante’s time Astronomy and religion were inseparably intertwined in the prevalent Cosmogonies. The Cosmogony we find in Dante, the peg on which he hangs his Divina Commedia, with the seven heavens surrounding the earth and seven hells inside it, had come down certainly from Arab and possibly prior sources; the Empyrean, the primum mobile, the seven Purgatories, and the Earthly Paradise (the antipodes of Jerusalem) were later additions, the latter being added so soon as it was generally recognized that the earth was round, though the time of the navigator was not yet.
Dante constructed none of this machinery, he used it merely; it represented the knowledge, that is, the belief, of his time.
Between Dante and Milton there was a gap; but what a gap! It was filled by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama, to mention no more, and the astronomers and geographers between them smashed the earth-centred heavens, the interior hells, and the earthly paradise into fragments.
It was while this smashing was working its way into men’s minds that Milton wrote his poem, and he, like Dante, centred it on a cosmogony. Well might Huxley call it “the Miltonic Hypothesis”! but how different from the former one, from which it was practically a retreat, carefully concealed in an important particular, but still a retreat from the old position.
Milton in his poem uses, so far as heaven is concerned, the cosmogony of Dante, but he carefully puts words into Raphael’s mouth to indicate that after all the earth-centred scheme of the seven heavens must give way. But the most remarkable part of “Paradise Lost” is the treatment of hell.
Milton’s greatness as a poet, as a maker, to my mind is justly based upon the new and vast conceptions which he there gave to the world and to which the world still clings.
To provide a new hell which had been “dismissed with costs” from the earth’s centre, he boldly halves heaven and creates chaos and an external hell out of the space he filches from it. “Hellgate” is now the orifice in the primum mobile towards the empyrean.
In Tennyson we find the complete separation of Science from Dogmatic Theology, thus foreshadowed by Milton, finally achieved. In him we find, as in Dante and Milton, one fully abreast with the science and thought of the time, and after another gap, this one filled up by Newton, Kant, Herschel, Laplace, and Darwin, we are brought face to face with the modern Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution. The ideas of heaven and hell in the mediaeval sense no longer form a necessary part of it, in Tennyson they have absolutely disappeared. In those parts of his poems in which he introduces cosmogonic ideas we have to deal with the facts presented by the heavens and the earth which can throw light upon the ancient history of our planet and its inhabitants.