"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed," wrote Pascal in the passage from which the title of Rebecca West's new novel ["The Thinking Reed"] is taken. The phrase is curiously suggestive of Miss West's own work. "Thinking," none could deny who watched the flashing wit in her essays of feminism many years ago; nor in the subsequent volumes of her literary essays, at all too widely spaced intervals. But a reed also is something through which music may be made, and even in Miss West's critical writing (sometimes, I have suspected, in spite of herself) there often has been a lyrical note with both depth and distinction. Her lyricism had a chance for fuller expression in the novels—in "The Return of the Soldier" in 1925 and "Harriet Hume" four years later. And in the four short novels published...