You sidle up to the piano lazily, bent over in a constrained manner; in your embarrassment, you place yourself before the one-lined or two-lined _c_, instead of before _f_; you sit unsteadily, either too high or too low, only half on the seat, leaning either too much to the right or to the left; in a word, as if you did not belong to the fatal music-stool.

Your manner awakens no confidence, and in this way announces that you have none yourself.

How do you expect to exercise control over a grand seven octave piano, if you do not sit exactly in the middle, with the body erect and the feet on the two pedals?
You are not willing to look the friend straight in the face, with whom you are to carry on a friendly, confidential discourse! Even if your attitude and bearing were not so injurious and dangerous for the performer as it is, still propriety and good sense would require that you should excite the confidence of your hearers in you and in your playing by a correct position of the body, and by a certain decision and resolution, and should prepare him to form a good opinion of you.
There are, indeed, many _virtuosos_ who think they give evidence of genius, by throwing themselves on to the music-stool in a slovenly, lounging manner, and try to show in this way their superiority to a painstaking performance, and to make up by a showy _nonchalance_ for what is wanting in their playing.

You are, however, a stranger to such assertion of superior genius, and to such an expression of intensity of feeling; you do it only from embarrassment, and from a modest want of confidence in your own powers, which is quite unnecessary.

Our great masters, such as Field, Hummel, Moscheles, Mendelssohn, and others, had no taste for such improprieties, for such manifestations of genius.