In my misspent youth I fell in love with the literature of England, and the period between the late Victorians and WWII was especially attractive to me. Recently at a used book sale I found a couple fat volumes containing parts of “A Dance to the Music of Time,” by Anthony Powell, a member of the generation that included such authors as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Auden and his circle.

“Dance” is a cycle of 12 novels that follows the fortunes of a group of rather elite members of the same generation from public school and university into the world of the mid-twentieth century. It was written between 1951 and 1975. Beginning at page one of 12 volumes is clearly a daunting prospect, but according to some people it is a masterpiece, the English “Remembrance of Things Past,” unless it isn’t.

So I bought the two volumes, containing the first six books and am now pushing on through the third of them. Whether I will persist to the end is as yet undecided. For starters, “Dance” is often lauded as a comic novel and that’s one reason I decided to take the plunge. I have always had a weak spot for the antic spirit that is so much a part of English literature and a relative rarity in America. Twain is in first, but who’s second? Our comic novelists get no respect.

The once powerful critic F.R. Leavis claimed in a book of he same name that “The Great Tradition” of the novel could be summed up as Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad and Lawrence. With the exception of Austen, not a laugh in the bunch. My pantheon would run rather to Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Chesterton, Waugh, and Amis the elder. But if “Dance” belongs in this company, it is taking a long time proving it. So far the humor is so dry as to be arid. Am I willing to wade through another nine volumes waiting for the joke, if any, to pay off.

Then there’s the whole question of the wisdom of such vast novelistic tapestries which my French professor friend Jane reminds me are called romans fleuve, riverlike sequences that just keep running on and on. Some critics trace the idea to Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales which is not the most auspicious of beginnings.

Aristotle would have hated them. He argued that a drama must preserve the unities, that is contain a single action, be set in a single place and be restricted to a brief space of time. This is obviously a trifle restrictive and later drama and film has taken vast liberties with the notion. But it is noteworthy that the novel is a peculiar, even unique aesthetic creation in this regard.

All other art forms take place in one sitting, so to speak. That is, they offer a complete, uninterrupted, focused aesthetic experience. A ballet, a symphony, a drama, a film, a poem (even an epic), a novella, a painting, a sculpture you meet and applaud now. Even a work of architecture, before the invention of the elevator, could be experienced all at once, undiluted.

The novel, by contrast, requires you to pick it up and put it down over and over, to experience it over days, weeks or even months. Your concentration is broken by daily life and then has to be returned to the fictional world. The Victorians published their novels serialized over a year or more in magazines. In our time, TV has adopted this technique to keep bringing the audience back again and again. In the extreme case of the soap opera the story, such as it is, can continue virtually forever. But this tends to make more economic than artistic sense.

Randall Jarrell once mockingly rewrote an old-fashioned definition of the novel (a prose fiction of a certain length) by calling a novel an extended piece of prose fiction with something wrong with it. And one of the things wrong is often the length. More is frequently less when it comes to art. Concision and intensity often trump sweep and amplitude unless your goal is to read yourself to sleep a chapter at a time for a year or two. Is a sprawling “War and Peace” really preferable to a taut “The Death of Ivan IIlych?” I don’t think so. Does anyone really prefer a gaggle of Henry plays to a single “Twelfth Night” or “Othello?” Unlikely.

The superiority of an interminable cycle of novels to one well-crafted volume is hard to argue.I like Trollope a lot, largely because of his voice. I have paddled through all six of the Barsetshire novels and a like number of Pallisers, but they do go on. Surely peak performances like “Barchester Towers” and “The Way We Live Now” are much more satisfactory than a long procession of novels of various quality.

I admit I have never been able to get beyond the first book of Proust. The prose is richly beautiful and seductive, but hundreds of pages of it is like gorging on pastries. And I found myself less interested in the matter than in the manner. Similarly, I can not clam to have visited all of the corners of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and have never braved Balzac’s Human Comedy which runs to something like 90 novels and stories. Life is too short.

Powell’s contemporary, C.P. Snow, wrote a long series (Strangers and Brothers) that is now widely ignored as is the Forsyte Saga. I feel sure that in each case a few peaks may be worth visiting but not at the expense of so many valleys. Indeed, the word saga seems like a flashing red light to me.

I make an exception in the case of the “Parades End” tetralogy of Ford Madox Ford. It is really a single long book packaged as four, about Christopher Tietjens and his horrible wife and enchanting lover, not a panoramic saga as in the case of Powell and Proust with so many characters that you need a scorecard to keep track.

I may carry on with Powell a few volumes more, I’ve paid for them and parsimony rules my life. And in the middle of the third book, about 500 pages in, it began to show flashes of wit and signs that ironic juxtapositions of characters already met will ensue. But I think the odds of my making it to the bitter end is slim to none. “Dance” is too long. Most novels are too long. Fitzgerald once said novelists were of two sorts — the putter-inners and the taker-outers. Fitzgerald classed Thomas Wolfe with the former and himself with the latter. I’m on his side. Brevity really is the soul of wit.