Of course, Fielding’s own conception of genre contain three terms important to discuss: “ridiculous,” “amiable,” and “natural.”  Having already called his sister Sarah’s novel, David Simple a “comic epic poem,” Fielding continues: “This fable [David Simple] hath in it these three difficult ingredients, which will be found on consideration to be always necessary to works of this kind, viz., that the main end or scope be at once amiable, ridiculous, and natural”.  Obviously, Fielding refers to “end” in the sense of a thing’s guiding principle or telos, but I will discuss the literal “end” of Joseph Andrews as capable of shedding light on Fielding’s understanding of these three terms, and then address the end as telos in the third section, while suggesting some literary and theoretical implications of this kind of comedy and Fielding’s understanding of it in literary theory.
The first issue to deal with is ‘artistic discovery.’  Jacques Maritain says, ‘artistic discovery portrays a conduct of life in a way not done before.’  In other words, Fielding’s method of character building, though not very original in the sense that their conduct of life is not distinctive, it is original in that the portrayal of their life, in the characters of Mrs. Slipslop, Fanny Andrews, or Joseph Wilson had never been done before.  The implication for art?  As Henry James puts it, “the only thing that concerns the novel is the cookery.”  All characters simply get to live a way of life natural to them: Adams’s quixotic identity is natural for his character, Slipslop’s ridiculousness is natural for hers, and Joseph and Fanny embody naturality.  For Fielding’s art, then, there is a distinction between the characters’ ends (as telos) and the artist’s purpose.
The end of the characters in Joseph Andrews is simply to be the kind of person that they are as best they can.  This is the basis for defending Fielding from only the idea that he presents an inflexible or limited moral view.  John James Peereboom suggests that Fielding is not a great artist, but only a good writer of period fiction.  Peereboom fails to distinguish between Fielding’s moral purpose of art, and the end of Fielding’s art.  Insofar as his fiction is art, his characters are fulfilling their end of a work of art.  There can be no question of Joseph Andrews’ end, only a question of Fielding’s artistic purpose.  The purpose is something coming from outside of the work of art, something that causes that art to come into being.  Granted, Peereboom may be right that Fielding’s moral purpose is irrelevant, but this does not mean Fielding’s artistic end is no longer relevant.  Hence, this study of Joseph Andrews as art focuses not on Fielding’s moral purpose, but on his artistic purpose: the formulation of the method of a new genre of fiction.
