Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page A

decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost.” Dublin Castle caved in and the play opened, to capacity audiences and huge publicity , on 25 August. Yeats issued a statement: “Tomorrow night Blanco Posnet will have a triumph. The audience will look at one another in amazement, asking what on earth did the English Censor discover objectionable. They will understand instantly. The root of the whole difference between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are certainly always true to ourselves. In England they have learned from commerce to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone.”
    Even Patrick Pearse was impressed, praising Yeats and Lady Gregory for “making a fight for Irish freedom from an English censorship”. In her account of the opening night, Lady Gregory reported that “a stranger outside asked what was going on in the Theatre. ‘They are defying the Lord Lieutenant,’ was the answer; and when the crowd heard the cheering, they took it up and it went far out through the streets.” George Bernard Shaw later said that Lady Gregory was “the greatest living Irishwoman”. However , her daughter-in-law Margaret, recently married to Robert, told Lady Dunsany that, although Yeats had not seen any rehearsals, “realizing that all the English and foreign critics had collected and that there was a stir, he asked her to let him take the [last dress] rehearsal, saying he wished the reporters to think he had stage managed it, and she is so used to giving way to him that she agreed”.
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    A mong the audience that night was the twenty-seven-year-old James Joyce, home briefly from Trieste, and he published an account of the whole business in Il Piccolo ella Serda in Trieste. “Dubliners,” he wrote, “who care nothing for art, but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy … and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over … at the curtain fall, a thunderous applausesummoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.” For Joyce, the play confirmed his views on Shaw. “Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting … In this case he has dug up the central incident of his Devil’s Disciple and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.”
    Joyce had known Lady Gregory since 1902. He had read his poems to her and asked for advice. She invited him to Coole, but he did not go, deciding instead to go to Paris. He wrote to her: “I am going alone and friendless … into another country … I do not know what will happen to me in Paris but my case can hardly be worse than it is here … And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end. You should write and ask him to breakfast with you on the morning he arrives, if you can get up early enough, and feed him and take care of him and give him dinner at Victoria before he goes and help him on his way. I am writing to various people whomight possibly get him tuition, and to Synge who could at least tell him of cheap lodgings.” Yeats did as he was told. Arriving at Euston Station at six in the morning to meet