Need give you no pain,
No thousand times shall you
Think on me again.
A little bit loving,
A little bit true,
And a little bit faithless,—
What else could you do?
“The most genuine of all folksongs, and almost the only kind which is still made,” as E. H. Meyer says of it, this schnaderhüpfl is a single strophe of four lines,[[1050]] complete in itself, always improvised—though it often becomes traditional—and always in the native dialect; it is not a fragment of some older and longer song, but rather lends itself to combination into a popular lyric of oral tradition.[[1051]] Careful comparison shows that similar quatrains, probably of similar origin in the dance, occur not only in Welsh, in Italian, French, and Spanish, in Lithuanian, in Hungarian, in Roumanian, Greek, Russian, Polish, everywhere in European speech, but even in Syrian, in Malay, and such distant languages. It is known in Chinese. Most closely related to it are the stev of Norway, of which Landstad[[1052]] gives a small collection in his book of Norwegian ballads. Granting that the real stev must be improvisation, he is too quick to connect them with the old scaldic poetry and with earlier and longer poems, regarding these quatrains—he hesitates, however, in stating the case—as wreckage of ancient ballads and once an effort of the bard. The theory of débris, thus tentatively asserted, is successfully answered by Gustav Meyer, as it is by a consideration of the schnaderhüpfl quoted in these pages; and it fares no better here than it does when applied to Italian strambotti and the artistic work of Theocritus and Vergil. Indeed, Landstad’s own account of the stev confutes his theory about them. Making these quatrains, he says,[[1053]] was once a universal social custom, and lingers even yet.[[1054]] His picture of the peasants gathered for a winter evening’s amusement, guests and especially the older people sitting at tables which run along the walls, men at one end, women at another, while the young people dance in the middle of the room; the “drinking” staves sung as the ale cups go round, where women often answer to rough but jolly quatrains from the other end of the tables, and where every person must sing his stave; the rude compliments and vivacities of the dance: all this points to a survival of primitive custom. Traditional verses often serve to open the contest nowadays, but improvisation begins with the personal combat, and the fun grows fast. These older staves have a standing refrain for the second and fourth lines of the quatrain;[[1055]] but the modern kind are like the schnaderhüpfl and are improvised throughout. A touch of “sentiment and reflection” is not unusual; for example:[[1056]]—
I know where to look for my bridal mirth,—
In a coffin black deep down in the earth;