Attending a preview week performance of Stephen Wadsworth’s
production of Moliere’s Don Juan at the Shakespeare
Theatre in Washington, I experienced one of the most uncomfortable
moments I have ever felt in a theater. Of course you know the basic
story of Don Juan, or Don Giovanni as da Ponte,
Mozart’s Italian librettist, called him. He is an aristocratic
rogue and a seducer who, apprehended by the father of one of his
victims, kills him. Later, to show himself untroubled by conscience
over this deed, he invites a statue of the dead father to dinner
with him. The statue descends from its pedestal and keeps the
appointment, offering Don Juan an opportunity to repent of his
wicked ways. The Don indignantly refuses to be otherwise than he
always has been, and he is dragged down to Hell.
In Moliere’s version of the story, there is an earlier
opportunity for penitence when his own father reproves him for his
conduct and for a moment it looks as if he has taken it. But once
his father leaves and his servant, Sganarelle, congratulates him on
his amendment of life, he repents of his repentance, saying he
hasn’t changed at all: Je ne suis point change. Even the
moving statue won’t change him. He says that his pretense of
adopting a different course is nothing but a stratageme
utile in order to trick his father. But he doesn’t stop there.
There are plenty of others who do the same, he tells Sganarelle. So
many, indeed, that
There is no longer any shame in acting thus. Hypocrisy
is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.
The character of a good man is the best of all characters one can
play nowadays, since the profession of hypocrisy has wonderful
advantages. The imposture of this art is always respected, and
though it be detected, no one dares to speak against it. Men are
censured for all other vices and everyone is at liberty to attack
them openly; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice, which, with its
own hand, shuts everyone’s mouth and peacefully enjoys a sovereign
impunity. By means of shams a close fellowship is formed among all
people of the same set: he who offends one brings them all down
upon him, and even those whom everyone knows to act in good faith
in the matter and whom we know to be really sincere, these people,
I say, are always the dupes of the others. They run heedlessly into
the snare of the humbugs and blindly support those who ape their
actions. How many, do you think, I know, who, by this stratagem,
have dexterously patched up the disorders of their youth, who have
put on, as a shelter the cloak of religion, and who, under this
venerated guise, have permission to be the most wicked fellows on
earth? It signifies nothing that their intrigues and they
themselves are known to be what they are; they are not, for all
that, less credited in society; and a certain lowly bending of the
head, a humble sigh and a pair of upturned eyes, justify, before
all the world, all they may do. It is under this convenient shelter
I intend to take refuge and to secure my affairs. I will not
abandon my cherished habits, but I shall take care to conceal them,
and divert myself with as little noise as possible. If it should
chance that I am discovered, I shall, without raising a finger,
find the whole cabal looking after my interests and I shall be
defended by it against, and in spite of, everybody. In short, this
is the true way to do whatever I please with impunity. I shall set
myself up as a censor of the actions of others. I shall judge ill
of all and have a good opinion of myself alone. I will never
forgive anyone who has offended me, however slightly, and I will
quietly keep an undying hatred. I will act as avenger in the
interests of heaven and, under this convenient pretext, I will
persecute my enemies. I will accuse them of impiety, and I will let
loose against them those indiscreet zealots who, without knowing
for what reason, will raise an outcry against them, will load them
with abuse and will openly damn them on their own authority. It is
thus we must profit by the foibles of mankind: a wise man adapts
himself to the vices of his age.
Throughout this long speech, as delivered by Jeremy Webb in the
role of the Don, the audience laughed and clapped and cheered.
Hooray for the libertine! Bravo the murderer! So long as he is
assailing the hypocrisy of more respectable folk, we’re meant to be
on his side, apparently.
I know there is a fashionable view, derived from the
existentialist philosophers, that Don Juan is an admirable
character because he is the only one in the play, or in Mozart’s
opera, with the guts to be who he really is and not to dissemble
and make a virtue of his weakness like the bourgeois prigs and
hypocrites he defies. But somehow that point of view, like the
belief in the Nietzschean superman, depends on his being unique, or
at least in the minority. If the bourgeoisie is united in finding
bourgeois respectability merely hypocritical then it’s not really
respectable anymore, is it? Once everybody is defiant, then there’s
no one left to defy. Once vice becomes universally admirable, then
it is virtue which is the quality of the rarer and higher sort of
fellow. Once everybody worships at the shrine of the
Ubermensch, then the Ubermensch becomes a bit of a
joke.
Yet I suspect that the cheers were not really for vice but
because the audience were typically eager to find a contemporary
political allusion in the Don’s words, as Mr. Wadsworth and the
cast were probably equally eager to supply it. The humbugs and
hypocrites were immediately identified with — who else? —
President George W. Bush and his Christian supporters. This was not
because of any particular act of hypocrisy on their part, I
imagine, for hostility would surely have made much of it if there
were one. Rather, it is because, like Don Juan, the urbane and
cynical theater-going public in America naturally assume that
all virtue and piety are hypocrisy. At least they are as
ready as Don Juan to assume it if it suits their purposes.
The Don’s purposes are of course to continue living his life of
debauchery without paying any price for it, so at least there is
some payoff to him in such unlovely cynicism. But I have no reason
to suppose that his cheering audience on the night I saw the play
were anything but ordinarily decent Americans who wouldn’t dream of
corrupting a virgin, let alone murdering her father, but for whom
the pleasure of hating George W. Bush and the Christians who
support him is enough of a reward for adopting this miserable view
of human nature. They are like Chesterton’s Higgins, “the Strange
Ascetic” — or one
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun
— unless you count hating as fun. As one who has enjoyed only a
very indifferent success as a practitioner of the virtues but who
has a great deal of admiration for them, who at any rate believes
that neither the President’s nor most of his Christian followers’
virtues are merely hypocritical, I briefly felt what it must be
like to be a member of a hated minority in the midst of a mob out
for blood.
