He occupied the illustrious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr. Burdon Sanderson, the
smotherer of dogs, in a laboratory set up for him.
In vain did Ruskin protest against this horrible educational cancer being grafted on to the happiness, peace, and light of gracious Oxford. Convocation preferred the blight of the coward Science to the cultivation of all that was beautiful, distinguished, humane, and brave; and they reaped as they had sown, they kept the dog smotherer and lost the radiant spirit and uplifting eloquence of the inspired seer. Ruskin resigned and Oxford heard that voice of supreme nobility no more.
The Vice-Chancellor for very shame could not bring himself to read Ruskin’s letter of resignation to convocation. The editor of the University Gazette also had the effrontery to leave a letter from Ruskin, giving the reasons for his resignation, unpublished; and the Pall Mall Gazette crowned the edifice of poltroonery by announcing that he had resigned owing to his “advancing years.”
Evil communications corrupt good manners, and association with vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. Time is merciful and their very names are forgotten.
Ruskin had, a little time before these events, asked the University for a grant to build a well-lighted room for the undergraduates apart from the obscure and inconvenient Ruskin school; his request was instantly refused on the plea that the University was in debt, yet in the very next year this debt encumbered seat of learning and courtesy voted £10,000 for the erection of a laboratory for the vivisector and £2,000 more towards fitting it up and maintaining it,—for troughs and gags and cages and the rest of the horrible paraphernalia.
This must I should imagine be the most squalid page in the history of modern Oxford.
More than thirty years have passed since that University thus publicly preferred a
dog smootherer to one of the noblest of teachers and saintliest of men.
Both are now long departed. The one can no more block up the wind-pipes of living dogs and watch their dying convulsions, and the other can no longer lead the minds of youths and maidens to seek and find beauty in the visible world about them and recognise in it the hand of God—but the world has known which of these men led the youth of Oxford to look up and which to look down, and to-day a merciful oblivion covers the names and doings of this triumphant vivisector and his valiant supporters, while to the farthest inch of the English-speaking realms the writings of Ruskin are treasured in a million homes and his name acclaimed with grateful reverence.