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SULLIVAN AND "THE LOST CHORD" 155
Again," "Golden Days," "The Sailor's Grave," "The Distant Shore," and "My Dearest Heart."
"The Absent-minded Beggar " stands, of course, in a category by itself. "This was a song," says Mr. Findon in his Life of Sullivan, "written for the 'man in the street,' but certain critics, in whose eyes Sullivan could do no right, took serious objection to it on account of what they called its vulgarity. In the postscript to a letter he wrote : ' I am glad you appreciate the spirit in which the "Absent-minded Beggar" is written. I have no doubt that the Academicals will turn up their nose at it. They don't like a tune that the people can sing.'"
"The Absent-minded Beggar" was not the first poem of Rudyard Kipling's that Sullivan had been anxious to set. One of a very different kind, the well-known "Recessional," had greatly attracted him, but he could not succeed in getting a setting to satisfy himself. His biographer, Mr. Lawrence, gives in facsimile an interesting and characteristic letter which Sullivan received from Kipling on the subject, in which he expresses a hope that Sullivan would some day see his way "to the one inevitable setting that must be floating about somewhere," and adds, "there will be no other setting authorised |
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