Parenting & Family Quote by Georg Brandes

Brandes slips a small defense into what looks like a harmless autobiographical aside. “I was a town child” concedes the usual Victorian assumption: urban upbringing equals insulation, softness, secondhand experience. Then he pivots - “it is true, but” - a rhetorical shrug that refuses the stereotype’s verdict. The line isn’t pastoral nostalgia; it’s a claim to sensory legitimacy. He’s insisting that proximity to streets and salons didn’t disqualify him from the credibility that “open-air life” is supposed to confer.

That matters because Brandes, as a critic, spent his career arguing for literature and culture that faced reality rather than hiding in pieties. The subtext is: don’t mistake my cosmopolitanism for detachment. He’s positioning himself as both modern and grounded, a thinker whose mind was formed in cities but whose attentiveness extends beyond them. “Plants and animals” lands with strategic plainness, almost childlike in its simplicity, as if he’s stripping away intellectual ornament to prove a basic capacity for wonder. It’s also a quiet rebuttal to the romantic myth that authenticity lives only in the countryside.

Contextually, Brandes emerges from a Europe rapidly urbanizing, where the city becomes both the engine of progress and the accused source of alienation. His sentence threads that needle: the metropolis shapes him, yes, but it doesn’t sever him from the nonhuman world. For a critic often cast as the cold anatomist of ideas, the line humanizes - and signals that “real life,” for him, includes the living texture outside the study.