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Essay on John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress"
From the time when the book became a subject of interest to scholars, there has been considerable speculation as to the sources of the allegory. Dr. Johnson first called attention to the similarity between the opening of The Pilgrim's Progress and the first lines of Dante's Inferno; and he thought that Bunyan might have read Spenser's Faerie Queene. The resemblance to Dante must be purely accidental, for, as Johnson adds, there was no translation of the Divine Comedy when Bunyan wrote; and the passages from the Faerie Queene cited by recent critics in support of Johnson's conjecture do not convince the unprejudiced reader that Bunyan made any use of Spenser's poem. Many other books have been suggested as possible sources, but no single passage in The Pilgrim's Progress has been pointed out which seems clearly indebted to anything other than Bunyan's own inventiveness or his knowledge of the Bible.
The conception of human life as a pilgrimage is one that might occur to any contemplative person, and long before Bunyan's time an enormous literature had grown up in which this notion is treated from numberless points of view. It had become a literary convention; yet it is improbable that Bunyan had read or even heard of any of these books. Certainly time spent in reading them he would have considered wasted. The fact is that Bunyan cared nothing for literature as literature. He had the poet's mind and feeling, but for all that, he felt that the only concern of importance for a man was the saving of his soul. And he reached this conclusion early in life. It would be possible, with a fair degree of certainty, to make a list of all the books that Bunyan ever read. Almost the only one not distinctly religious in character would be Sir Bevis of Southampton......
