mise 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.

{228}

Chapter XX

The Hero in History

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.

Back into the Middle Ages Dante and Savonarola draw us, marvelling at
the narrow limits which bound the vision of such free unfettered minds.
The little grey town of Tuscany lives chiefly on the fame