The politeness they had in mind was different from what Shaftesbury maligned as 'Court-Politeness' – that 'dazzling' and 'corrupt' form of behaviour that had reached its height in the court of the Sun King but had also poisoned the Restoration court of Charles II, for all the royal indifference to French frippery and forms. France, Shaftesbury insisted, was a modern-day Rome: decadent and in decline. The future lay with a simpler, less adorned style of social interaction and an aesthetic that was 'above the modern turn & species of Grace, above the Dancing-Master, above the Actor & the Stage, above the other Masters of Exercise.' The idea was to replace the decaying court with a new kind of moral authority, rooted in urban life and the freedoms of Britain's hard-won parliamentary system. To this end, Steele and Addison founded The Spectator in 1711. It quickly became the most important journal of its time, and its essays were circulated and reprinted widely. At a penny an issue, it was reasonably affordable and appealed to men and women of the elite and aspiring classes alike. 'Mr Spectator' was a representative 17th-century gentleman: born on a rural estate, he resided in London and spent his days debating standards of taste and style. As a Frenchified ballet-master, John Weaver may have seemed an unlikely ally of the sober-minded Steele, but Weaver nonetheless managed to convince Steele that ballet was an invaluable civic tool – that its manners and graces were not necessarily effete and frilly but instead a form of politeness that might be turned to the cause of English civic propriety. In 1712, Weaver published an open letter in The Spectator, introduced by Steele himself, in which he argued the merits of dancing as a high art, but above all as a vital tool 'of universal Benefit,' as he later put it, 'to all Lovers of Elegance and Politeness.' That same year Tonson published Weaver's Essay Towards an History of Dancing.
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
