In the same decade Nietzsche and Ibsen were sometimes compared. Ibsen, like Nietzsche, was a combative spirit and held entirely aloof from political and practical life. A first point of agreement between them is that they both laid stress on not having come of small folk. Ibsen made known to me in a letter that his parents, both on the father's and the mother's side, belonged to the most esteemed families of their day in Skien in Norway, related to all the patrician families of the place and country. Skien is no world-city, and the aristocracy of Skien is quite unknown outside it; but Ibsen wanted to make it clear that his bitterness against the upper class in Norway was in no wise due to the rancour and envy of the outsider. Nietzsche always made it known to his acquaintances that he was descended from a Polish noble family, although he possessed no pedigree. His correspondents took this for an aristocratic whim, all the more because the name given out by him, Niëzky, by its very spelling betrayed itself as not Polish. But the fact is otherwise. The true spelling of the name is Nicki, and a young Polish admirer of Nietzsche, Mr. Bernard Scharlitt, has succeeded in proving Nietzsche's descent from the Nicki family, by pointing out that its crest is to be found in a signet which for centuries has been an heirloom in the family of Nietzsche. Perhaps not quite without reason, Scharlitt therefore sees in Nietzsche's master-morality and his whole aristocratising of the view of the world an expression of the szlachcic spirit inherited from Polish ancestors. Nietzsche and Ibsen, independently of each other but like Renan, have sifted the thought of breeding moral aristocrats. It is the favourite idea of Ibsen's Rosmer; it remains Dr. Stockmann's. Thus Nietzsche speaks of the higher man as the preliminary aim of the race, before Zarathustra announces the superman. They meet now and then on the territory of psychology. Ibsen speaks in _The Wild Duck_ of the necessity of falsehood to life. Nietzsche loved life so greatly that even truth appeared to him of worth only in the case of its acting for the preservation and advancement of life. Falsehood is to him an injurious and destructive power only in so far as it is life-constricting. It is not objectionable where it is necessary to life. It is strange that a thinker who abhorred Jesuitism as Nietzsche did should arrive at this standpoint, which leads directly to Jesuitism. Nietzsche agrees here with many of his opponents.