Arm in Arm With Henry James : ITALIAN HOURS <i> By Henry James</i> , <i> Edited by John Auchard</i> , <i> (The Pennsylvania State University Press: $29.95; 343 pp.)</i>

Having just been vacationing with Henry James in Italy, I wish to recommend him as a traveling companion. Personally, he may be something of a cumbersome fussbudget on the road, as Edith Wharton has intimated, but the new edition of his “Italian Hours” passed the ultimate test for a travel book in today’s carry-on world: I took it as my only book on a two-week trip, and was not tempted to add literature to my luggage along the way.

I might have traveled with the undauntable Mrs. Wharton herself, as Mr. James sometimes did. But the best idea in her “Italian Backgrounds”--that one should examine the remote distances behind Italian portrait-sitters for tiny illustrations of contemporary life--is easily mastered beforehand. Mr. James’ mentor, William Dean Howells, has an “Italian Journeys” and a “Venetian Life,” both of inestimable charm and detail, but it is not crucial to read these on location, as it were.

With the marvelous moderns, including Mary McCarthy, John Julius Norwich, Jan Morris, Hugh Honour, J. G. Links and Peter Lauritzen, one risks racing through and then being left to transport the dead weight of a completed book. Thick prose lasts longer, and complex observations are best tested on the spot.

So I used to go to Venice with that old poop John Ruskin. Following faithfully in his footsteps (which is more than his wife, Effie, could manage; quicker than generations of dutiful tourists to discover that he was a drag, she put herself into the hands of occupying Austrian officers), I would trudge around with “The Stones of Venice,” trying to school myself to disdain the cheap attractions he condemned: the Renaissance, for example.

Henry James tried Ruskin, too, and the first, blessed thing he does in this collection of essays, written between 1870 and 1908, is to reject the company of that august voice “pitched in the nursery-key, (which) might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess.” Mr. James then performs the useful function of repeating the major Ruskin pronouncements, while confiding that he often finds them ill-humored, invidious or insane.

He also takes pains to make himself more agreeable. Unlike Mr. Ruskin, who preferred the tops of ladders, Henry James is eminently sociable. He knows or recognizes everyone: privileged American expatriates who open their far-flung palaces to him, sometimes for delicious moments when they have the grace to absent themselves; an ancient family who, having discovered that the ancestral painting they sacrificed to living expenses is now a star of the National Gallery in London, became “enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might really have done for them”; Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel II, “as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible”; the even more accessible Bourbon claimant to the French throne, spotted dining on his terrace and thus described as “a famous pretender eating the bread of bitterness”; and a Neapolitan festival crowd featuring in abundance “the happy address, the charming expression, the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in short, of vulgarity and brutality.”

His characterizations of places are sociable, too: “Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction”; the S. Maria della Salute “waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon . . . with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe,” while St. Peter’s in Rome “speaks less of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance.”

There are no vulgar “travel hints” in this collection of essays, although the one time I used it as a guidebook, soliciting Mr. James’ opinion on whether to stop at Lucca, I was not disappointed. (“She smiles up at you her greeting as you dip into her wide lap, out of which you may select almost any rare morsel whatever,” he promised, and it was so.) Rather, his immediate usefulness during travel is the way he falls in with the tourist’s weaknesses.

He catches us in the act of collecting impressions with which to expound later on the Italian soul, and offers the lesson he learned when a picturesque, rural, singing cavalier inspired him to reflect on the buoyantly cheerful Italian spirit. Stopping to ask Mr. James for a light, this ersatz opera buffa hero proved to be “an unhappy, underfed, unemployed” communist eager to chop off royal heads.

Lest I thought to have kept secret my vainglorious habit of picturing myself as the chatelaine of every palace I visit, he remarks genially: “I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes to you.”

He anticipates the overload that occurs at the end of a week, and prescribes the antidote: “When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain.”

Even Jamesian fussing is oddly comforting for the perspective it offers on current conditions. He grumbles about being pushed about in a gondola, which hardly seems so confining now that it is--at more than $1 a minute--an impossible luxury, and he maligns public rapid transit, by which he means the pokey vaporetto from which we malign the speedboats. He deplores restoration--”Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished”--yet he can hardly see the Tintorettos he so much admires, and now we can.

In particular, commonly but unbecomingly, he resents tourism, often using the metaphor of Italy as a bazaar or museum “where the little wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking” and “the buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his bones for a fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your attention.”

Yet no one can explain better why we are all there. While then we would only be repeating, “Gee, if only these old walls could talk,” he says, “Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it somehow,” and “The spirit of the centuries sat like some invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder,” and “Other places perhaps may treat you to as drowsy an odour of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area.”

If Henry James has a fault as a guide, it is that he sometimes forgets to introduce us to his friends by name, and he never tells us what connections the places he visits have with the novels of Henry James. Fortunately, the editor of this volume provides this information in footnotes, where he also corrects a few errors and gently brings the information up to date.

The book is skimpily illustrated. As a matter of fact, the illustrations that ought to be there appear in another new book, “The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent” by Hugh Honour and John Fleming (which also contains Mr. James’ Venice essays, although not those on the rest of Italy).

But, then, one hardly needs to pack pictures for a trip to Italy.