Beţia de cuvinte
By the close of the 1860s, Pantazi Ghica was among the main targets of early criticism from Junimea—a literary society which expressed a conservative vision and was opposed to the cultural and political tenets of liberalism. Ghica's works were among those discussed by Junimea's Titu Maiorescu in his famous essay of 1873, Beţia de cuvinte. The title, meaning literally "inebriation with words", attacked Romantic liberals over their experiments with Romanian language, their Romantic nationalist aesthetic guidelines, and their emphatic prose. The influential Maiorescu saw these as a main source for the widespread cultural and social problems facing Romania during its process of Westernization.
Thus, Revista Contimporană contributors such as Ghica, V. A. Urechia, August Treboniu Laurian, and Gheorghe Sion are listed by Maiorescu as negative examples in Romanian literature, for their use of coined neologisms, as well as for their tautologies and contradictions. Maiorescu sarcastically recorded that Ghica was introducing new words to the Romanian lexis, through the means of Francization. Among other samples, the author used as illustrations several fragments from Pantazi Ghica's novella Marele vistier Cândescu ("The Great Treasurer Cândescu"). He noted the implicit tautology in Ghica's term silenţiu lugubru ("lugubrious silence"), pointing out that the first word covered the meaning of "silent" (thus leaving the notion to be read "silent silence"). A more complex one, listing several synonyms on end, read:
"[...] all left in silence but their faces showed the same pain, the same exasperation, the same desperation."
Pantazi Ghica, Urechia, Dimitrie August Laurian and Petru Grădişteanu decided to issue a common reply to Maiorescu's accusations, using Românul as their venue. The Junimist intellectual believed that their answer was an ignoratio elenchi, and dismissed their defense as "beside the point" (nu e la chestie). On the occasion, he also presented Ghica with more of his own mistakes.
Although not a Junimist, Odobescu himself agreed with such views, and pointed out further inexactitudes in the works of Pantazi Ghica—these comments are featured in a chapter of his major book, the Pseudo-cynegetikos, in its revised edition of 1887. Odobescu recorded the polemic between Ghica and the contributors to Junimea's magazine Convorbiri Literare—the former stood accused of having embellished his own biography by claiming to have won the interest of French writers during his stay in Paris. Odobescu hinted that he agreed with this assessment, stressing that Alexandre Dumas and Alfred de Musset had since died, and thus could not confirm that Pantazi Ghica had befriended them. He also noted, like the Junimists, that the chronological order indicated by Ghica was spurious. The latter argument referred to Ghica's statement that, in 1852, Dumas and de Musset had listened to his rendition of Vasile Alecsandri's poem Înşiră-te Mărgărite, which had in fact been completed in 1856, and first made available for the public four years later.
Ghica was unnerved by Maiorescu's reaction to his work, and verbally attacked the younger literary critic in several contexts spanning his career. This was the case in 1878, when both of them stood in the Chamber for opposite camps, and when Ghica heckled Maiorescu, who was giving a speech. On one occasion, Pantazi Ghica depicted Maiorescu as "a sort of a literary trickster", and himself claimed that his adversary was "at odds with grammar". Elsewhere, he claimed that Maiorescu's style "entirely lacks the conditions of serious criticism". With time, the conflict between Ghica and Convorbiri Literare degenerated into open hostility. Thus, in an unsigned piece of 1875, the magazine claimed to translate Victor Hugo's Chansons des rues et des bois: instead of the hunchback Mayeux, whom Hugo had placed at the end of a cortege grouping all animals, the Convorbiri Literare version had introduced "Pantazi" and adapted the rhyme accordingly.
Maiorescu's verdicts on Pantazi Ghica were shared by more modern Romanian critics. Tudor Vianu called Ghica "prolific, but not gifted". Elsewhere, he backed Ghica's inclusion among the "victims of Inebriation with words [italics in the original]", as well as Maiorescu's criticism of his Francized speech. Vianu's generation colleague George Călinescu defined Pantazi Ghica as "untalented" (although he acknowledged his "vast literary culture"), while Ştefan Cazimir likened his writings for the stage to what he believed was Ion Luca Caragiale's worst play, the melodrama O soacră. Călinescu referred to Marele vistier Cândescu as featuring "annoying neologisms" and "the lack of any intuition, no matter how modest, for historical color." Two exceptions among commentators were Gheorghe Adamescu, who valued several of Ghica's works (including his 1850 piece about Vasile Cârlova), and Ştefan Sihleanu, who credited Ghica with having single-handedly introduced Alessandro Manzoni's type of historical novels to local literature, in their adapted novella form.
