d ill or well. A sentence can be
musical or unmusical. But in detachment words are no more preferable
one to another in their sound than are single notes of music. What you
take to be beauty or ugliness of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or
ugliness of meaning. You are pleased by the sound of such words as
gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor-house. They seem to be
fraught with a subtle onomatopoeia, severally suggesting by their
sounds the grace or sanctity or solid comfort of the things which they
connote. You murmur them luxuriously, dreamily. Prepare for a slight
shock. Scrofula, investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse. Horrible
words, are they not? But say gondola--scrofula, vestments--investments,
and so on; and then lay your hand on your heart, and declare that the
words in the first list are in mere sound nicer than the words in the
second. Of course they are not. If gondola were a disease, and if a
scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect
of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. This rule may
be applied to all the other words in the two lists. And these lists
might, of course, be extended to infinity. The appropriately beautiful
or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word
connotes. Beauty sounds as ugly as ugliness sounds beautiful. Neither
of them has by itself any quality in sound.

It follows, then, that the Christian names and surnames in my first
class sound beautiful or ugly according to what they connote. The sound
of those in the second class depends on the extent to which it suggests
any known word more than another. Of course, there might be a name
hideous in itself. There might, for example, be a Mr. Griggsbiggmiggs.
But there is not. And the fact that I, after prolonged study of a
Postal Directory, have been obliged to use my imagination as factory
for a name that connotes nothing and is ugly in itself may be taken as
proof that such names do not exist actually. You cannot stump me by
citing Mr. Matthew Arnold's citation of the words 'Ragg is in custody,'
and his comment that 'there was no Ragg by the Ilyssus.' 'Ragg' has not
an ugly sound in itself. Mr. Arnold was jarred merely by its suggestion
of something ugly, a rag, and by the cold brutality of the police-court
reporter in withholding the prefix 'Miss' from a poor girl who had got
into trouble. If 'Ragg' had been brought to his notice as the name of
some illustr