The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.


...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)