Titu Maiorescu

Childhood

Between 1846 and 1848, Titu Maiorescu attended the primary school in Craiova. During the days of the revolution his father Ioan was sent on a mission to Frankfurt am Main. Meanwhile, his mother, Maria Maiorescu, traveled with the children to Bucharest, Brașov, and then Sibiu. This must have been a very disconcerting time for the young Titu. In December 1848, under the care of Avram Iancu, the family arrived after more dislocation in Blaj and finally in Braşov. Titu Maiorescu was then at last able to continue his primary school education. From 1848 until 1850, he attended Protodeacon Iosif Barac's School.

Between 1850 and 1851, after finishing primary school, Titu Maiorescu was enrolled at the Romanian Gymnasium in Schei-Braşov, a gymnasium grammar school founded in 1850 by his uncle Ioan Popazu. He studied there up until the fifth grade. At the gymnasium in Brașov, he met Anton Pann, who left him with an indelible impression.

University studies

Maiorescu was very eager to obtain his university degree. After only one year of studies in Berlin, he obtained his PhD at Giessen, magna cum laude, and then after a year, he received his licence at the Philology and Philosophy University of Sorbona. One year later, after he had studied at the University of Paris, he took his licence in law. However, his eagerness did not affect his demureness in his studies; the foundations of Maiorescu's extremely solid culture were established during this period.

On 3 January 1857, he sent an essay signed with the name Aureliu to the Transylvania Gazette in order to publish some of his translations from Jean Paul's works. In the following number he also intended to publish the translation of a short story written by Jean Paul and entitled New Year's Eve Night. Although the translation was not published at that time, the letter that Aurel A. Mureşianu edited later in the Gazette of books, no 1, in 1934 is considered as the first publishing attempt of T. Maiorescu. It was republished under the same title. In 1858, to support his academic activity, he worked as a teacher of psychology in private boarding schools and as a French teacher in the house of a legal counselor named Georg Kremnitz.

As a preparatory teacher in the French language for the Kremnitz household, Titu Maiorescu taught all of the family's four children, including Klara (his future wife). There was also Helene, Wilhelm (future Dr. W. Kremnitz, Mite Kremnitz's husband, born Marie von Bardeleben) and Hermann. Titu Maiorescu got his PhD in philosophy at Giessen, magna cum laude. Giessen University amiably recognized his last two years at Theresianum which could count as a part of his PhD studies. When he returned to Romania, he published the article "The Measure of Height through a Barometer" in the review Isis or Nature.

Work as a literary critic

The beginnings of Maiorescu's literary critic activity stand apart from the previous generation. Unlike the years before the revolution of 1848, when an intense need of original literature was determined by Heliade Rădulescu to address enthusiastic appeals for Romanian literary works, the seventh decade of the 19th century was marked by a large number of poets and prosaic authors who had very limited artistical devices, but were blessed with high ideals and pretences.

It was a time when the selection of true values was needed, on the basis of certain aesthetic criteria Maiorescu agreed to accomplish that task. The adversaries of his ideas depreciatively called his action „a judicial criticism“ because his studies and articles did not analyse in detail the literary work that they had discussed - nor looked at the many apothegms within it. These are based on an ample culture, a determined artistic taste and on impressive intuitions.

However, the mentor of the Junimea Society considered this type of criticism (neatly affirmative or negative) necessary only to that epoch of clutter of values, as its modalities of execution would gradate later, in the literary life, when the great writers would elevate the artistic level and implicitly would have the public's exigency augmented.

Maiorescu's work as a tutor, as fighter for the assertion of values, would dominate the remainder of his entire life that would be divided between his political activity (he would become prime minister, but would lose the friend that was his youth, P.P. Carp), and his University activity. As a professor he had promoted disciples of great value, like C. Rădulescu-Motru, P.P. Negulescu, Pompiliu Eliade and others. In addition, there was his lawyer activity and his prominence as a literary critic.

Maiorescu was often critiscized for not spending satisfactory time writing literary works, depite being one of the most influential literary critics of his time, marking a new period of Romanian Literature: the period of the great classics. The role of the Junimea Society and of Maiorescu himself who is linked to the creation and the assertion in the public's conscience of writers like Eminescu, Creangă, Caragiale, Slavici, Duiliu Zamfirescu and others.

Frequently criticized for appearing detached, passionless, and distant (a trait summarized by N. Iorga's comment: "Nobody was warm or cold beside him."), Maiorescu sought support and friendship from his financial and professional circles, including the benevolence of Junimea writers and his disciples. His critic Dobrogeanu-Gherea was also generous enough to support his character. In addition, his correspondence with Mihai Eminescu during the poet's stay at the Ober-Döbling sanatorium, where Maiorescu reassured him regarding medical fees, demonstrated personal care and concern as revealed through Maiorescu's open address to his friend cited below:

"Do you want to know where the means to pay your fees come from for now? Well, Mr. Eminescu, are we such strangers to each other? Don't you know the love (if you allow me to use this exact word, although it is stronger than other words), the often enthusiastic admiration that I and our entire literary circle feels for you, for your poems, for your whole literary and political work? But it was a real explosion of love that we (all your friends and only these) contributed to through the support of the few material needs that your situation requires. And you would have done the same in using the large or small sum you had when any of your friends would have needed help, so we cannot forget a friend of your great value".

Foundation of the Junimea Society

The 1860s were for Maiorescu the period of "popular prelections" (lectures on various problems addressed to quite large audiences). During this decade he participated in the foundation of the Junimea Society. He founded it alongside his friends I. Negruzzi, Petre P. Carp, V. Pogor and Th.Rosetti. He started his work as a lawyer and was thereafter elected principal of the "School Vasile Lupu" in Iași. Later he founded the review Convorbiri Literare in 1867.

Although the period that followed after the Union of 1859 represented an epoch of completion, namely through the ideals of the generation of 1848, the political accent still needed to be changed. Indeed, conditions were different from the romantic youth of Heliade Rădulescu, Alecsandri or Bălcescu. Maiorescu was representing the new generation, the Junimist Generation, which had a new conception on social and Romanian cultural life.

Regarding political ideology, Maiorescu was a retentionist, an advocate of a natural, organic and well prepared evolution. He was an adversary of the "forms without root". He presented his indictment in his article from 1868 entitled Against the present direction in Romanian culture, in which he criticized the implementation of certain institutions which appeared in inmitation of Western ones and which in his view had no appropriate root corresponding to the mentality, creation and cultural legacy of the Romanian people.