DANTE OR DANTON?
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—MiSS Gwen John's theory about the terra-cotta 'mask by Rodin, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is an ingenious one. But I fear the facts are against it. The mask seemsi really to be a portrait study from a still living sitter, of whomc there is actually a marble bust in the Musee Rodin at Paris., Rodin himself told me that when it was in his studio one or his admirers found in it a resemblance to Dante, which L confess escapes my own eye, and he named it accordingly. After it had been put on exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the autumn of 1914, a visitor suggested to me that it was much more like Baudelaire. I mentioned this one day to Rodin, and he immediately proposed that it should in future' be labelled " Baudelaire." No doubt he would have been equally ready to see it called" Danton," though here again the' likeness appears to me a distant one. But the mask started its catalogued career as Dante, and Dante it has remained.—I1
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