Titan, which Jean Paul regarded as his “principal work and most complete creation,” had been in his mind since 1792.  It was begun in 1797 and finished, soon after his betrothal, in 1800.  In this novel the thought of God and immortality is offered as a solution of all problems of nature and society. Titan is human will in contest with the divine harmony.  The maturing Richter has come to see that idealism in thought and feeling must be balanced by realism in action if the thinker is to bear his part in the work of the world.  The novel naturally falls far short of realizing its vast design.  Once more the parts are more than the whole.  Some descriptive passages are very remarkable and the minor characters, notably Roquairol, the Mephistophelean Lovelace, are more interesting than the hero or the heroine.  The unfinished Wild Oats of 1804, follows a somewhat similar design.  The story of Walt and Vult, twin brothers, Love and Knowledge, offers a study in contrasts between the dreamy and the practical, with much self-revelation of the antinomy in the author’s own nature.  There is something here to recall his early satires, much more to suggest Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

While Wild Oats was in the making, Richter with his young wife and presently their first daughter, Emma, was making a sort of triumphal progress among the court towns of Germany.  He received about this time from Prince Dalberg a pension, afterward continued by the King of Bavaria.  In 1804 the family settled in Bayreuth, which was to remain Richter’s not always happy home till his death in 1825.

The move to Bayreuth was marked by the appearance of Introduction to Esthetics, a book that, even in remaining a fragment, shows the parting of the ways.  Under its frolicsome exuberance there is keen analysis, a fine nobility of temper, and abundant subtle observation.  The philosophy was Herder’s, and a glowing eulogy of him closes the study.  Its most original and perhaps most valuable section contains a shrewd discrimination of the varieties of humor, and ends with a brilliant praise of wit, as though in a recapitulating review of Richter’s own most distinctive contribution to German literature.

The first fruit to ripen at the Bayreuth home was Levana, finished in October, 1806, just as Napoleon was crushing the power of Prussia at Jena.  Though disconnected and unsystematic Levana has been for three generations a true yeast of pedagogical ideas, especially in regard to the education of women and their social position in Germany.  Against the ignorance of the then existing conditions Jean Paul raised eloquent and indignant protest.  “Your teachers, your companions, even your parents,” he exclaims, “trample and crush the little flowers you shelter and cherish. * * * Your hands are used more than your heads.  They let you play, but only with your fans.  Nothing is pardoned you, least of all a heart.”  What Levana says of the use and abuse of philology and about the study of history as a preparation for political action is no less significant.  Goethe, who had been reticent of praise in regard to the novels, found in Levana “the boldest virtues without the least excess.”