TENNYSON, ALFRED. - English poet, b. at Somersby on 6 Aug. 1809, d. in London on 6 Oct. 1892. He was the most prominent and in every sense the most representative of the Victorian poets. Gifted with exceptional taste and an ear for music, he was a perfect craftsman of verse, a most musical seer trained in the school of Virgil.
He soon, however, fell into the error of binding himself too closely to the myths of his own age, of which he became the official poet, forcing himself to adapt his idyllic muse to civil events and social issues. He nevertheless lived apart from public life and never departed from his formal rigor. In works such as The lotus eaters (1833) and Ulysses (1842) he evoked the themes and motifs of classical epic poetry in elegant structures and cadences, and in the Idylls of the king, published in various instalments between 1842 and 1885 (the core appearing in 1859), he similarly took up the themes of the Arthurian epic, drawing on Malory’s Morte d'Arthur. In the elegies of In memoriam A. H. H., which the poet slowly composed between 1833—the year of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam to whom they are dedicated—and 1850, when the collection was published, a genuine and pathetic inspiration characteristically mingles with a nebulous and agnostic speculation on life and the hereafter.
attempt, so much so that the German jurist Geyer, judging the problem insoluble, compared it to the squaring of the circle. In view of the difficulties arising from the distinction in question, the compilers of the current Italian Penal Code modified the wording that had appeared in the Zanardelli Code, limiting themselves to requiring, in addition to suitability, the unambiguous nature of the acts. This solution, however, could not eliminate the distinction between preparatory acts and executive acts, which, even before being enshrined in the legal norm, is found in the reality of things: indeed, on closer inspection, the Italian legislator has done no more than give the sanction of positive law to the classical criterion, also accepted by Carrara, for identifying executive acts. Along these lines, it is clear that the problem of the meaning to be attributed to the requirement of unambiguousness assumes central importance. In this regard, it should be noted that if an act is unambiguous when, by its nature and the manner in which it is performed, it excludes any doubt that the author has set about committing a specific crime, it is necessarily to be held that the direction of the act must be inferred not only from the act itself but also from the complex of elements that accompany or precede its execution (such as the perpetrator’s confession, circumstances of time and place, etc.).
As for the requirement of the suitability of the acts directed towards committing the crime, it must be borne in mind that, according to the law of natural causality, every action that has not produced a certain result proves, in the concrete case, to be insufficient to produce it and is therefore, strictly speaking, unsuitable. From this it must be deduced that the suitability or otherwise of the conduct cannot be judged ex post, that is, in the light of all the circumstances actually existing in the individual case, but must instead be judged ex ante, by referring to the moment when the action was performed and forming a judgment on the basis of the circumstances that could have been known at that time. The action will therefore be suitable when, subjected to such an analysis, it appears adequate in relation to the result it was intended to achieve; it will be unsuitable in all other cases. But since suitability, assessed ex ante, is equivalent to adequacy in relation to a result prohibited by law, the consequence is that the suitability of the action means nothing other than its dangerousness. The attempt, therefore, is punishable when it materialises in a dangerous action, that is, whenever, at the moment it was undertaken, the subject’s conduct presented a likelihood of success.
Unlike other legal systems that impose the same penalty for the attempt as for the completed offence or leave it to the judge to apply the same penalty or a reduced penalty, the Italian legal system punishes the attempted crime less severely than the completed crime. Article 56, paragraph 2, in fact, provides that for an attempt the punishment shall be imprisonment of not less than twelve years if the penalty prescribed is life imprisonment, while in other cases the penalty fixed for the offence is reduced by one-third to two-thirds. If, moreover, during the execution of the crime and before it is completed, the offender withdraws from his criminal intent, voluntarily interrupting the action, impunity is granted, provided that the acts performed do not in themselves constitute a different offence (paragraph 3, Article 56). If, on the other hand, the guilty party, having completed the executive activity, decides, through subsequent reflections or events, to avoid the occurrence of the event and succeeds in preventing it, the penalty prescribed for the attempted crime is reduced by one-third to one-half (paragraph 4, Article 56).
With regard to canon law, the CIC, at canon 2212 §1, provides that there is an attempt when someone has performed acts which, by their nature, lead to the execution of a crime, but the crime is not committed either because the criminal design is abandoned or because the means employed are inadequate. This, which is the conatus in the strict sense, is contrasted in the same canon, at §2, with the delictum frustratum, which occurs when, in the presence of unambiguous and suitable acts, a cause other than the agent’s will prevents the crime from being completed (completed attempt). It is assimilated to the action of one who incites another to commit a crime without succeeding (canon 2212 §3).
Canon 2213 provides that the attempt must be punished, unless the agent has voluntarily desisted from the execution of the crime and no harm or scandal has resulted from the attempt. If a particular penalty is prescribed for a given attempt, it is to be considered as a true and proper offence (canon 2212 §4).