[383] Or rather by virtue both of its medium and object. Ihrer Natur nach are Hegel's words.
[384] Jenem ersten Ansichseyenden. That is to say, a relation indefinite, but essentially implying a further realization.
[385] Es nur eine unwahre Abstraction bezeigen würde. "Lack of comprehensiveness" would, of course, be more literal.
[386] In ihrem abstracten Gehalt. That is, regarded simply as the opinions of a private individual, and apart from all that may be implied in it under more universal relations.
[387] Der Zustand der allgemeinen Bildung, not an easy phrase to translate: the Culture-State" perhaps sums it up most completely. "The state of universal education" is too indefinite or goes too far.
[388] The whole spirit of this passage is a striking witness to Hegel's admiration for classical art. Whether the arguments brought forward are wholly sound when we consider them in connection with the Elizabethan drama, for example, may readily admit of a question. At the same time, as Hegel himself points out, Shakespeare unquestionably throws the time back to what is practically a mythical age in at least three of his greatest tragedies, "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and above all "King Lear."
[389] For the element of beauty implied in ordinary craftsmanship, and the modern view, pressed so strongly by William Morris and others, of this aspect of art and its modern necessity, the reader should peruse Professor Bosanquet's valuable "Three Lectures on Aesthetic" (see particularly Lecture II, p. 61 et seq.).
[390] Even an admirer of our author must admit, I think, here that the argument is somewhat overstrained. That Hegel possessed real humour and yet more irony few will deny who have studied him, but at times "the man with a theory" rather tends, as is so frequently the case with our German cousins, Goethe himself not excepted, to swallow up such sanative juices altogether.
[391] I presume the meaning is that the poem in the shape we now have it dates some 400 years after the Trojan war. But it is not very clear from Hegel's language whether he regards Homer as the poet who, as in the case of his example of the poet of the Niebelungenlied, fused that together or no. For if he did how could he have lived through the poems, an expression itself which is rather vague, more particularly as the better opinion is that they represent a different age themselves.
[392] Vernürnbergert. A word of course coined by Hegel. Made them, that is to say, at home in the Nuremberg of Hans Sachs.