To this period belongs a collection of Aphorisms whose bright wit reveals deep reflection.  They show a maturing mind, keen insight, livelier and wider sympathies.  The Devil’s Papers, published in 1789, when Richter, after a few months at Hof, was about to become tutor to the children of three friendly families in Schwarzenbach, confirm the impression of progress.  In his new field Richter had great freedom to develop his ideas of education as distinct from inculcation.  Rousseau was in the main his guide, and his success in stimulating childish initiative through varied and ingenious pedagogical experiments seems to have been really remarkable.

Quite as remarkable and much more disquieting were the ideas about friendship and love which Richter now began to develop under the stimulating influence of a group of young ladies at Hof.  In a note book of this time he writes:  “Prize question for the Erotic Academy:  How far may friendship toward women go and what is the difference between it and love?” That Richter called this circle his “erotic academy” is significant.  He was ever, in such relations, as alert to observe as he was keen to sympathize and permitted himself an astonishing variety of quickly changing and even simultaneous experiments, both at Hof and later in the aristocratic circles that were presently to open to him.  In his theory, which finds fullest expression in Hesperus, love was to be wholly platonic.  If the first kiss did not end it, the second surely would.  “I do not seek,” he says, “the fairest face but the fairest heart.  I can overlook all spots on that, but none on this.”  “He does not love who sees his beloved, but he who thinks her.”  That is the theory.  The practice was a little different.  It shows Richter at Hof exchanging fine-spun sentiments on God, immortality and soul-affinity with some half dozen young women to the perturbation of their spirits, in a transcendental atmosphere of sentiment, arousing but never fulfilling the expectation of a formal betrothal.  That Jean Paul was capable of inspiring love of the common sort is abundantly attested by his correspondence.  Perhaps no man ever had so many women of education and social position “throw themselves” at him; but that he was capable of returning such love in kind does not appear from acts or letters at this time, or, save perhaps for the first years of his married life, at any later period.

The immediate effect of the bright hours at Hof on Richter as a writer was wholly beneficent. Mr. Florian Fuelbel’s Journey and Bailiff Josuah Freudel’s Complaint Bible show a new geniality in the personification of amusing foibles.  And with these was a real little masterpiece, Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Maria Wuz, which alone, said the Berlin critic Moritz, might suffice to make its author immortal.  In this delicious pedagogical idyl, written in December, 1790, the humor is sound, healthy, thoroughly German and characteristic