The tragedy of the Moujik-garbed aristocrat, striving for self-perfection and cast down by compromise made necessary by love for others, drew to a close as he neared his eightieth year. He would have given everything, and he had kept something. Worldly possessions had been stripped from his dwelling, with its air of honest kindly comfort. More and more the descendant of Peter the Great's ambitious minister began to feel the need of entire renunciation. It was long since he had known the riotous life of cities, but even the peace of his country retreat was broken by discords since all did not share that longing for utter self-abnegation which possessed the soul of Leo Tolstoy, now troubled by remorse.
In the winter of 1910 the old man left the home where he had lived in domestic security since the first years of his happy marriage. It was severe weather, and his fragile frame was too weak for the long difficult journey he planned in order to reach a place of retreat in the { 227} Caucasus Mountains. He had resolved to spend his last days in complete seclusion, and to give up the intercourse with the world which made too many claims upon him. He died on this last quest for ideal purity, and never reached the abode where he had hoped to end his days. The news of his death at a remote railway station spread through Europe before he actually succumbed to the severity of his exposure to the cold of winter. There was universal sorrow, when Tolstoy passed, among those who reckoned him the greatest of modern reformers.
Across the spaces of the centuries flit the figures known as heroes, some not heroic in aspect but great through the very power which has forbidden them to vanish utterly from the scenes of struggle. Poets who wrote immortal lines and philosophers who mocked the baseness of the age which set up shams for worship, reformers with a fierce belief in the cause that men as good as they abhorred to the point of merciless persecution--these rank with the soldier, rank higher than the monarch whose name must be placed upon the roll because his personality was strong to mould events that made the history of his country. High and low, prince or peasant--all knew the throes of struggle with opposing forces, since without effort none have attained to heroism.