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To Blake, heavenly characters were entirely real. You could run into them on the street and speak of them casually. "I always thought that Jesus Christ was a snubby," he remarked--Blake had a snub nose--"or I should not have worshipd him if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle-nosed rascals." He spoke to angels, chatted with the devil and dined with the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. The latter told him that "my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded and remain confirm'd that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote." This, of course, was Blake himself speaking through the mask of Isaiah, for if a creative mind was ever suffused with "honest indignation" it was his.
The man who wrote that "one law for the Lion & Ox is oppression" was also a passionate democrat, a republican. His views as a workingman (which printers were) aligned him with the most radical tenets of English working-class thought. He was as much a traitor to Georgian belief as the execrated Tom Paine. He contemptuously referred to George III as "old Nobodaddy" and eagerly awaited his death. In an age when any utterance of disloyalty to the Crown could be and was severely punished, Blake was fearless in expressing his views. His sympathies flew to the weak and the downtrodden. He was always on the side of liberty and instinct. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," he wrote in the Proverbs of Hell. And also: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." (The latter sounds more like Sade than the gentle poet of Lambeth, who wouldn't have hurt a hair on a child's head.)
In matters of art, Blake's hates were as passionate and as swollen with moral assurance as his likings. The painters he really disliked relied on color and modeling by tone, "broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors. Their art is to lose form." Whereas his was "to find form, and to keep it"--by means of pure outline drawing. The villains of his scheme were Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt: "a class of artists, whose whole art is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art." True art was linear, clear, like Raphael, Durer, Michelangelo and antique sculpture--and, Blake didn't hesitate to add, his own. The very thought of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy and the most esteemed and successful painter in Britain, gave Blake fits: Reynolds was a slopping, daubing Antichrist. "This man," Blake scrawled across the title page of his copy of Reynolds' printed lectures, the Discourses, "was Hired to Depress Art:--This is the opinion of Will Blake."
Blake not only despised the way Reynolds painted, but also he was sure Reynolds' malign influence had blasted his career. The sore truth seems to be that Reynolds had scarcely heard of Blake, and would not have felt threatened by him anyway. But time was on Blake's side. Does any Reynolds fix itself in memory with the tragic vividness of Blake's watercolor of King Nebuchadnezzar, a taloned half-beast on all fours, glaring from the confines of his intolerable fate like an animal in a cage? Blake believed he had been appointed by supreme powers to render the most elevated scenes of Milton and the Bible in the language of Michelangelo and Raphael; in this he was wrong, but what an ambition!