Four Men-Part Three

God created the cosmos, thereby banishing the void and chaos that preceded it. For as long as God exists and reigns supreme, there can be no void, and nothing from the void can exist in or intrude upon the universe. All things are under God and there can be no horror emanating from anything in his Creation. All horrors must wait, lurking outside the circle of star-firelight that is the universe, like beasts from before time and history.

But "God is dead," or so proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science, published in 1882. So if God is dead, then there can be cosmic horror. He no longer stands as a bulwark against void and chaos. And like so many horrors, cosmic horror had to wait until the nineteenth century before it could emerge--or re-emerge--for God's position at the top of creation was forever secure and unassailable before then. His law was always supreme. Weird came back in the nineteenth century. (Weird is not a horror.) But maybe it is our little fit of foot-stamping--God is dead, we cry--that made horrors, both fictional and actual, possible in the twentieth. Remember that the most murderous regimes in human history have been atheistic.

It's useful, I think, to look at chronologies. Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead in 1882 (or recognized a belief among his fellows to that effect). That was very near the beginning of Guy de Maupassant's career as a published author. The first version of "The Horla" was published in October 1886. The second came along in 1887. Also in 1886, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Nietszche was published. (We would recognize the title as almost science-fictional.) In that book, Nietzsche wrote:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Chapter 4, No. 146)

If you think only in terms of genre fiction, then you might read that as predictive of stories of supernatural horror, weird fiction, and science fantasy of the coming century. We have Nietzsche's concept and stories of that type overtly in our own, in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023).

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Nietzsche read Maupassant. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I do not see from what century of the past one could dredge up such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as in contemporary Paris [. . .] to single out one of the strong race, a genuine Latin toward whom I am especially well disposed, Guy de Maupassant. (From Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever," Chapter 3, in my Vintage edition, pages 243-244; Ecce Homo written in 1888 and published posthumously.)

I don't have a biography of Maupassant. Surprisingly, such a thing is hard to come by. So I don't know whether he ever read Nietzsche.

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Nietzsche had a mental breakdown on January 3, 1889. He was institutionalized, I believe, that same month. In the in-between time, he wrote a number of letters to his friends. Most of these were signed "Dionysius." (Remember that the Nietzschean title character in "The Last Bonneville," by F. Paul Wilson is named Dwight, a name derived from Dionysius.) Nietzsche hung on until 1900 and died in Maupassant's (and Lovecraft's) birth month, August, also the same month in which the Horla becomes known to his hapless victim. (Twenty and five make twenty-five.) As for Maupassant, he had his breakdown almost exactly three years later, on January 2, 1892, when he tried to kill himself. He was committed to an asylum and died there in 1893. What is it about January?

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Guy de Maupassant died of syphilis. There was a time when people thought that Nietzsche had died of the same thing. I guess that idea has gone by the wayside. H.P. Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, also died of syphilis. He had a psychotic breakdown in April 1893 and died in 1898. Lovecraft's mother, Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft, also suffered from mental illness and was also committed to an institution. She died in 1921. So all three authors--Nietzsche, Maupassant, and Lovecraft--had mental illness in their lives, and all three died while quite young. The same things are true of Edgar Allan Poe who preceded them.

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Before moving on to Part Four of this series, I will point out that Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) studied art in France. I'm not sure that anyone knows the exact dates, but I believe he returned to the United States in the period 1893 to 1894 or 1895. I don't think there's any doubt that Chambers read Maupassant. How could he have avoided it? And there are some similarities in their respective works, even if Lovecraft observed in his consideration of The King in Yellow (1895) what he called "a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by [George] Du Maurier's Trilby [first published in 1894]."

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I had hoped to get more into "The Horla" in this part, but that will have to wait until next time.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley