As Blake never abandoned his belief in the potential
imminence of an apocalypse, he did not, like Wordsworth or Coleridge, alter the
essentially revolutionary pattern of his thinking. But neither could he feel,
with Byron or Shelley, any enthusiasm for a political restoration of the Greece
and Rome he so much distrusted. The only real change that the decline of revolutionary
fortunes made in his thought was in causing him to reject the Orc man as an
apocalyptic agent. The only God that exists exists in man, and all religion
consists in following the right men. Men of action of the type Blake calls
“heroic villains” are not the right men, and the visionary is on a disastrously
wrong course if his vision of the divinity of man leads him to hero-worship of
this kind, as Carlyle’s did. But the Orc man, the revolutionary leader who is
fighting for liberty (Washington is not a very dramatic example of Blake’s Orc
symbolism; the red-shirted Garibaldi would be much better) does make a real
appeal to the imagination. Revolution attracts sympathy more because it is
revolution than because of what it proposes to substitute; this is connected
with the fact that we indulge the young more than old because they are young
and not because they are right. But as Orc stiffens into Urizen, it becomes
manifest that the world is so constituted that no cause can triumph within it
and still preserve its imaginative integrity. The imagination is mental, and it
never has a preponderance of physical force on its side:
The Whole Creation Groans to be deliver’d; there will always be as many Hypocrites born as Honest Men, & they will always have superior Power in Mortal Things. You cannot have Liberty in this World without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.*
*quotation from William Blake’s notes on A Vision of the Last Judgment (“For the Year 1810 Additions to Blakes Catalogue of Pictures &c”)