Art and Other Matters

by Akutagawa, Ryunosuke · 2026-06-22

In this sequence of sharp, self-questioning aphorisms, Ryunosuke Akutagawa considers what an artist owes to a work, to technique, and to the difficult pursuit of perfection. He rejects both crude utilitarianism and empty formalism, arguing that form and content become inseparable in genuine expression. Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Michelangelo, Raphael, Ni Yunlin, Rodin, Delacroix, and Cézanne appear as touchstones, while Akutagawa repeatedly turns his judgment upon himself. His wit cuts through romantic slogans about inspiration and the soul, yet the essay's final movement reveals the anxiety beneath its confidence: repetition, complacency, and facile cleverness may harden into an artist's death. Written in 1919, the piece is at once a compact aesthetics, a collection of provocations, and a candid record of artistic discipline.

Above all else, an artist must strive to bring a work to perfection. Otherwise, serving art would become meaningless. Even humanitarian emotion, if that alone is what one seeks, may surely be obtained simply by listening to a sermon. Once we undertake to serve art, what our works offer must first and foremost be artistic emotion. There is no way to achieve this except by striving for the perfection of the work.

Art for art's sake, taken one step further, degenerates into the theory that art is merely play.

Art for life's sake, taken one step further, degenerates into the utilitarian theory of art.

Perfection does not mean producing a work in which the reader can find no careless flaw. It means fully realizing each of the many ideals that art has developed through differentiation. Whenever an artist fails to do so, he ought to feel ashamed. A great artist, therefore, is one whose realm of perfection is largest in scale. Goethe is one example.

Naturally, no human being can exceed the limits of the abilities nature has given him. Yet if he remains idle, he will end without even discovering where those limits lie. Everyone must therefore discipline himself with the intention of becoming a Goethe. If embarrassment keeps you from that ambition, you will never become so much as the coachman at Goethe's house, however many years pass. This does not mean, of course, that you must go about announcing that you intend to become Goethe.

When we try to set out upon the road toward artistic perfection, something obstructs our exertions. Is it the desire for an easy life? No, it is not so simple. It has a stranger nature. It is like the curious homesickness for the foothills beneath the clouds that overtakes a climber as he ascends higher up a mountain. If this comparison conveys nothing, then I can only say that person is, as far as I am concerned, a soul beyond salvation.

A caterpillar on a tree branch is constantly exposed to mortal danger from temperature, weather, birds, and other enemies. To preserve his own life, an artist must overcome dangers just as the caterpillar does. The most dreadful among them is stagnation. No—in the realm of art, there is no such thing as standing still. Unless one advances, one inevitably retreats. When an artist begins to regress, a kind of automatic process always starts: he writes nothing but the same sort of work again and again. Once this automatism begins, he must recognize that he is approaching death as an artist. When I wrote "The Dragon," I myself was plainly close to that kind of death.

A person with a more correct view of art does not necessarily produce better work. Am I alone in feeling desolate when I consider this? I hope I am not.

Content is fundamental and form secondary—this doctrine is in fashion. Yet it is a plausible lie. The content of a work is content that has necessarily become one with its form. Anyone who imagines that content comes first and form is fashioned afterward speaks in blindness to the essence of creation. A simple example will make this clear. Nearly everyone must know that Oswald in *Ghosts* cries, "I want the sun." What is the content of those words? Dr. Tsubouchi once rendered them as "It is dark" in a commentary on *Ghosts*. Logically, "I want the sun" and "It is dark" may perhaps mean the same thing. As content embodied in words, however, they are separated by ten thousand miles of white cloud. The content of the majestic phrase "I want the sun" can be expressed by no form other than "I want the sun." Ibsen's greatness lies in his precise grasp of the whole in which that content and that form are one. No wonder Echegaray praises it so highly in his preface to *The Son of Don Juan*. Confuse the content of those words with the abstract meaning inside them, and the mistaken doctrine of content above all else follows. Form is not something skillfully constructed around content. Form exists within content—or vice versa. To anyone who cannot grasp this subtle relation, art will remain forever a closed book.

Art begins with expression and ends with expression. Phrases such as "a painter who does not paint" or "a poet who writes no poetry" have no meaning except as metaphors. We must regard them as more foolish than the phrase "chalk that is not white."

Yet those who worship the mistaken doctrine of form above all else are equally disastrous. In practice they are probably even more disastrous than the advocates of the mistaken doctrine of content. The latter at least give us a meteorite in place of a star. The former would see a firefly and take it for a star. Because of my temperament, education, and other circumstances, I must continually guard against being carried away by the applause of these false formalists.

When we truly read the work of a great artist with our whole hearts, we are often overwhelmed by its power until every other writer seems almost nonexistent. It is like turning one's gaze elsewhere after looking at the sun and finding the surroundings dim. When I first read *War and Peace*, there was no limit to my contempt for all other Russian writers. But this is not right. We must remember that besides the sun there are also the moon and stars. Even while Goethe marveled at Michelangelo's *Last Judgment*, he retained enough composure to hesitate before scorning Raphael's works in the Vatican.

To create an extraordinary work, an artist may, according to the time and circumstances, even be capable of selling his soul to the devil. I mean, of course, that I too might do it. There are others who look as though they would manage it more readily than I.

Mephistopheles, having come to Japan, says: "There is no work about which some abuse cannot be spoken. The wise critic's task is simply to seize the moment when that abuse seems likely to win general acceptance. He must then exploit the opportunity to place a skillful curse upon the author's entire future. Such a curse works twice over: upon the public and upon the author himself."

Whether one understands art or not lies beyond the reach of words. It is said that one can know whether water is cold or warm only by drinking it. Understanding art is no different. To think that reading books on aesthetics is enough to make one a critic is like thinking that reading a guidebook will keep one from getting lost anywhere in Japan. The public may still be deceived. But artists will not be—or perhaps even the public will not, unless the world consists entirely of Santayanas—.

I sympathize with every spirit of rebellion in art, even when at times it rebels against me.

Artistic activity, even in the greatest genius, is conscious activity. Suppose Ni Yunlin, while painting a pine upon a rock, extended every branch of that pine extravagantly in one direction. He may or may not have understood precisely how those extended branches produced a particular effect within the picture. But he knew perfectly well that extending them would produce an effect. If he did not know even that, Ni Yunlin was no genius at all, but merely a kind of mechanical puppet.

"Unconscious artistic activity" is only another name for a swallow's cowrie shell—an impossible thing. That is why Rodin despised what people call inspiration.

Cézanne once heard someone criticize Delacroix for painting flowers wherever he happened to please, and protested with great intensity. Cézanne may have intended only to defend Delacroix. Yet within that protest his own true character appears with perfect clarity: the formidable Cézanne who would not shrink from breaking into a cold sweat a hundred times if that was what it took to seize upon a necessary law capable of producing artistic emotion.

The practical use of these necessary laws is what we call technique. Anyone who despises technique must belong to one of two classes: either he has never understood art from the beginning, or he uses the word "technique" in a bad sense. To give it a bad meaning and then proclaim its wickedness is like treating vegetarianism as another name for miserliness and denouncing every vegetarian in the world as a skinflint. What can such contempt accomplish? Every artist ought to refine his technique more and more. To return to Ni Yunlin, he must learn ever more thoroughly the knack of stretching the pine branches in one direction to create a particular effect. "Write with the soul. Write with life." Such gaudy, gold-leaf phrases are fit only for sermons addressed to middle-school boys.

Simplicity is precious. But simplicity in art is the simplicity reached at the utmost limit of complexity. It is simplicity pressed and pressed again, wrung out to the last drop. How much creative anguish must be accumulated before that simplicity is attained? Anyone blind to this crucial point might pass through sixty cosmic ages and still chatter like a child while congratulating himself on eloquence surpassing Demosthenes. Compared with such effortless simplicity, the complex may in fact lie far closer to true simplicity.

The danger is not technique. It is the facile cleverness with which technique may be wielded. Clever facility easily disguises a lack of seriousness. Shameful though it is to admit, some of my inferior works are made of precisely that kind of cleverness and nothing more. This is probably a truth that even any enemy of mine would gladly acknowledge. And yet—

My disposition to settle comfortably into a fixed place, if allowed to compose itself with elegant dignity, threatens to degrade me just as I am into a demon-child of aesthetic refinement. Until I can blow this disposition entirely away, I must state clearly, both to others and to myself, what I believe, and through sheer obstinacy toward myself as well as others prevent a shell from forming around me. That is why I have chosen to indulge in all this loquacity. It seems the time is approaching when, unless I begin to struggle with all my might, my spirit will find no release. (August 10, 1919)